The Kootenay List

When I looked for a business around here, the directories I found were years out of date, half the phone numbers were dead, or the useful part sat behind a membership fee. People asked Facebook instead. So in July 2026 I started building one list of every business in the Kootenays, free to search and free to be listed. It went live in August and now covers 83 towns from the Boundary to the Rockies.

The data is the product, so it was built like one. Listings came from public sources and were filtered and deduplicated before any page was designed. All but 16 of the 5,733 listings name the public source they came from, most often the business's own website, a town licence list or a chamber roster. The other 16 were sent in by their owners, and their listings say so. The sources page lists all 3,346 websites the listings came from, grouped by who runs them.

The front page is a wall of real business names you can sweep with a finger or search by typing, with a pause button for anyone who wants it still. The look borrows from a civic record book, with ruled entries and stamped dates, because the site's job is to be trusted like a public office. Below the wall sits the Front Window, a painted storefront that one owner fills each day with their own photo, name and words.

A list this size can say things nobody else in the region can. The Tally, published as The State of Kootenay Business, counts the region town by town, and picking a town redraws every figure for it. As far as I can find, 58 of the 83 towns had never had their businesses counted in public. The funding page sorts 103 grants and support programs by what the money is for, with the closest deadline first.

For owners, the List is a free page they did not have to build, with a real link to their website if they have one. Claiming it adds their own words, hours, four photos, a logo and a booking link, and an owner who sends their words and a photo or logo joins the line for a day in the Front Window. A form on every listing reports a closure or a wrong number, and any owner can ask to be taken off with one email.

The List is built toward WCAG 2.2 AA, and its accessibility page lists what gets checked before each change and what still falls short. It runs as pages generated from one dataset, with no database server to pay for or maintain, which is what keeps a free product free to run. If your business depends on people trusting a lot of information, like a catalogue, a directory or a schedule, this is the standard I would build it to.