// The Chiswick Directory

A 1,200-listing business directory for the W4 community

A searchable, categorised directory of 1,200+ Chiswick businesses with user accounts and self-service listings.

// summary

The Chiswick Directory is the W4 community's guide to local businesses: 1,200+ listings across 24 categories, from building trades to food & drink, with search, filters, user accounts and self-service listing submission. Developed together with Dawn Wilson of DW Multimedia, alongside our long-running work on the Chiswick Calendar.

chiswick.directory, scrolled from the top

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What the site is

The Chiswick Directory bills itself as “your comprehensive guide to businesses serving the W4 community”: a searchable, categorised directory of over 1,200 local listings. The biggest categories give a feel for the scale: 200+ building services and trades, 200+ health, beauty and wellbeing, and hundreds more across retail, food & drink and twenty other categories.

The Browse by Category grid: 24 photographed category tiles, each with its own listing count, from Emergency Services with 25 up to Building Services and Trades with 203 and Health, Beauty and Wellbeing with 201

Twenty-four categories, each one carrying its own count, which is the quickest way to see how deep the directory goes.

What it does

Search and browse. Visitors search by name or browse 24 major categories, with additional filters to narrow results.

A results page inside the Plumbers category: a bar reading 36 Listings Found with an All Categories filter and a Sort By control, above cards carrying each business name, website, address and phone number

Browsing down to a trade gives a clean result set, sortable, with the contact details on the card.

Self-service listings. Businesses create accounts and add or manage their own listings, so the directory grows without an administrator typing every entry in.

The Add Listing step headed Choose a Package, offering a free listing with basic contact details beside a recommended featured listing at three hundred pounds that adds a description, images, reviews and a map

A business signs itself up and picks its own package, so nobody has to type the entry in for them.

Part of a local ecosystem. The directory sits alongside the Chiswick Calendar, the daily community news site, and cross-promotes its news, events and Club Card membership programme.

How it’s built

The directory runs on the Directorist plugin, heavily customised to the client’s specific needs, right down to how the navigation works. That’s the same philosophy as my other builds: when a customisable plugin already does 80% of the job well, the sensible move is to bend it to the remaining 20%, not build a directory engine from scratch. Finished in 2025.

Built with

Built in partnership with Dawn Wilson of DW Multimedia, the same collaboration behind the Chiswick Calendar. On the Directory we worked as co-developers, with Dawn covering design and development alongside me.

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