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Behind The Firm List Blog
Territorial
With over 13,000 listings across 150+ countries, sometimes the site feels like it's bursting at the seems.
It's not really, but it's a lot to present in a coherent manner. More importantly (for me) is that it's
sometimes hard to keep straight on the backend.
So every once and a while, I do something to make things a little... simpler. They don't always seem, even
to me, to be any simpler at first, but they do eventually.
I still remember when every firm listing I had was on one page. Then it was broken up into countries...
It has grown and grown since then. I mean there's 1,400 firms in 235 cities/towns in California alone!
It made a lot of sense to split off the US listings to their own subdomain... giving them their own front
door, a shortened URL (one less subdirectory) and so on. Then it was Canada, Australia and the UK. Then
a few months back in was Denmark & The Netherlands. Today it was France.
Why these countries? Because they are countries with either rather large internal divisions (Australia,
Canada, the United Kingdom and the US) or they are countries with territories (Denmark, France, The Netherlands,
the UK and the US).
Thanks to the days of colonialism, some countries have far off territories, protectorates, etc. In the past
I handled these (French Polynesia, for example) as I would any country, but that didn't seem right.
In the end, in mot cases, it won't make much of a difference at all. In some cases, it will. And as with the
rest of this site, these small changes that were made for one set of reasons end up solving additional problems
I never thought of and end up laying the foundation for further growth & changes in the future.
The Firm List is nothing if not an example of organic growth. No grand plans were set out for it back in 1998.
Since then, I've had greater visions of what it might become, but the combination of limitations of my skillset
and the limitations of my time, have managed to keep the site growing and changing in small, sporadic changes.
That is what makes this site exciting to me. Just when I hit one sort of "rut" along the path of maintaining
a beast of a site something new catches my attention and I learn something new in the process.
Hopefully I am never making things too hard on people, ruining the site, etc. when I make these changes. But
somehow I don't think I am.
