Garden Center Listing?

What are ya'll doing using IE, anyway!?! :-)

I'll try to get it fixed.

dave

With Firefox, it works fine.

I would suggest holding off on adding mailorder companies already listed in the Garden Watchdog - it really doesn't make much sense to have them listed twice if there's any way to magically tie their existing entry into this resource, too. (It will also save on the doubled-up reviews.)

I'm using IE because I'm cheating and logging on to DG at work! Do you think I ought to tell them to switch to Firefox so I can play more? Ha ha ha ha ha!

Dea hangs head in shame - puter here gotta use ie, but when I'm at home different story :)

My 2 cents. Garden-quest or Garden Locator or Nursery Hounds or Local Dirt I like these mentioned before, Garden Directionary, GardenHounds or The Garden Rambler and the Garden Retriever is growing on me. Patti

I like Nursery-Quest.

Garden Quest

Since we're including u-picks, parks/arboretums, etc., I'd vote for something with "garden" in the name, rather than limiting it to "nursery". JMHO.

Garden Hound(s) is growing on me.

Or how about.....

Garden Mapper?

Garden Trekker?

Garden Rover? (also hounddog-ish ;o)

Zip code feature is working great here in Firefox Dave.

Forgot about parks and stuff. I think you ought to be able to see the name and intuitively know what it is though. Some of the suggestions don't fill that bill.

The zipcode map should work for IE users now. Could ya'll let me know?

Yes, works great. Thanks, dave. I better get busy - the closest one to me is 371 miles.

Zip is working well here on IE7 also. http://davesgarden.com/local/zip.php?zipcode=94517

Could we sort alphabetically by City within a state? You can see already the number of pages available for the greater Bay Area. Thx!

McGlory, I'm w/you. Let's don't get too cute w/the name. It needs to be intuitive. Nurseries or Nurseries Localized or Gardeners' Sources would be intuitive whereas "garden trails" and the like wouldn't.

Ann

I like Garden Hound and Garden Mapper. I also like Garden Directionary, though. LOL

Happenstance, I can't change the sorting on the zipcode page, but I can change it (and I did change it) on the regular search:

http://davesgarden.com/local/advanced.php?state=ca&country=&type=publicgardens&search_text=&submit=Search&sorter=cities

dave

Dave, I'm bumping into a few that should be listed under two categories (nurseries & christmas tree farms, specifically.) Any chance of making that a tick-list instead of a pulldown list? Also, being able to edit existing category names would be a nice-to-have at some point (for situations like when I give you "farmer's market" as a category, and then remember it should be" farmers' " or just "farmers", no apostrophe.

I'll see what I can do about the tick-list. It'll be difficult to change since I architected the system to be one category per entry...

Also, I changed your Farmers Market. For now, let's just manually change those - it's probably faster in the long run that me spending time making those editable.

dave

chuckle. Well, hopefully the spelling errors will be few and far between, so that's a-ok with me.

Maybe instead of tick-list, we add a secondary pull-down list (kind of an "also specializes in"....kind of thing?) I may be lacking imagination and foresight, but I don't think we'll encounter too many cases where a business should be listed in more than two categories.

Going back to Terry's comment from earlier today about doubling up entries for places that exist in GW because of their mail order business but are also open locally to the public...I would actually like to see separate entries and separate reviews for walk-in vs mail order, a company that does a mediocre job shipping plants could still be a great nursery to visit in person. They also sometimes have a slightly different selection of plants for walk-in customers vs for mail order. And I feel when people are writing reviews, they will focus on different aspects if it's a mail order nursery vs if it's a walk-in local place so I wouldn't want to mix those two together (for me, the most important thing for a mail order nursery is the quality of plants that arrive at my doorstep and I won't even shop there if they don't have a particular plant I want, but for a walk in nursery I don't necessarily know ahead of time what's in stock, and I'm assuming that most of the plants will be in decent shape and I can choose the nicest one for myself since I'm there, so the most important thing becomes the selection they have available, the types of plants they generally carry, how helpful the staff is, etc.) And lastly, I don't know if this is true in a lot of cases, but in at least one case that I know of, the mailing address for their mail order business is a PO box, and for the retail version you obviously need the actual street address so you at least need a way to capture that info. I'm definitely not opposed to having some sort of link between the local and Garden Watchdog versions so people know they're the same nursery, but I think there are enough differences in the retail walk in experience vs the mail order experience that there should be some way to distinguish the two in the reviews.

I hope not all GW listed companies get pulled over, as I certainly don't need people walking in while I'm in back hanging up my delicates. :-)

Great new addition btw.

Chris

You can just add that to the notes, Chris: "Please honk loudly before getting out of the car so that we can hide our delicates..." LOL ;-)

ecrane, those are good points - my concern is the confusion that having two entries will (without a doubt) cause.

And it really isn't fair to a vendor to get a double-whammy by getting two negatives from the same person, based on the same transaction (or benefiting from a second atta-boy for the same purchase.) We already deal with some confusion - and vendor disputes - over comments from walk-in customers posted to the Garden Watchdog.

I agree the mailing address/physical address would need to be addressed in a combined entry. And maybe there's a simple way to ensure that duplicate comments aren't posted by customers either happy or unhappy over the same purchase if a company is listed in both features.

But until we figure that out, I think it's prudent to concentrate on adding local sources, and if Dave figures out a nifty solution for the mailorder and retail vendors, we won't have much work to un-do.

Thanks Dave, for the alphabetical listing. It really helps, since at times some of the mileage is way off and for locals just knowing the town for an entry is more important than the actual mileage that Google picks up.

1. I agree that the "walk-in" experience can often be very different than the shipping experience.

2. Also another nudge about the "Mailing Address" vs the physical location is often not the same.

3. And the specializes in can be very important in some cases. For example a trip to POW in Wilton, CA is a long haul for most Bay Area gardeners. They have gorgeous trees, shrubs, perennials, but not a lot of the things found in your neighborhood garden center. Some could be disappointed without the additional information of "specializes in." The Dry Garden in Berkeley is an awesome place, but again it is a specialty nursery with lots of succulents, cacti, and exotic Australian and tropicals.

Hope we're not sounding unreasonable! You did ask for input Dave. :-)

Terry, you posted when I was typing this.....you have a better "big picture" view in most cases, but I'll leave my comments as I've typed then, stressing that they are just observations from a user's viewpoint.

This message was edited Nov 29, 2006 1:08 PM

Back to naming the listing - I love Garden Hound(s) and Garden Directionary. Both very creative names.

Thank you so much Dave! I had always wondered what was around here when I just had to go buy a plant (or 2). This will also be so wonderful when we travel.
Could we enter a zoo in maybe under public gardens, or would it be best to leave them out? I know the Denver zoo has some great tropicals and xericscape plants in summer, and zoolights around Christmas.
And what about Home Depot and Lowes? I would be in big trouble without their 1 year guarentees LOL. I just dont know if I dare go there with starting to list them.

How about "Garden Hot Spots" ?

Dave, a few suggestions as this handy-dandy feature takes shape:

1) Company emails should be masked, just as we do with GWD companies. Maybe their website URLs, too.

2) Is there any way to fully integrate the lat/long tool for those of us who have the hang of adding the Google URL?
- It would be nice if the URL would automatically populate the lat/long boxes in the entry (instead of inputting the URL, then copying/pasting the coordinates.
-Even better would be if the input box was located on the input page, as well as on the "additional info" link page.

3) Once a company's lat/long is entered for an entry, can you show a map in its place, rather than the coordinates?

4) Being able to map just the companies within a particular category for a given area (all u-picks, for example) would be great.

5) Administratively, can we kick out a report of all entries that need some TLC - such as missing lat/long coordinates?

Shelly221:

1) Zoos: If they have spectacular gardens then I think yes, go ahead and enter them in under "Public Gardens". I know the San Antonio zoo is worth visiting for their gardens alone, for example.

Home Depot and Lowes (and Wal-Mart) ought to be shunned from the list. They are consistent across the country and anyone can look in their local phone book to find them. I'd rather keep the list more focused.

dave

Good suggestions, Terry. I'll see what I can do!

dave

Terry,

Your requests #1 and #2 are finished.

dave

oh yay!!!! Thanks!

You guys are awesome! I was just going to put Iris City in there. It's a place near Nashville that grows iris (mostly) and other plants, too. But I don't think it's a 'Garden Center'. That's where I'll put it, but its not exactly accurate.

I was thinking we should probably expand "Garden Centers" to "Garden Centers & Nurseries"

I believe that would be a more accurate discriptor.

I updated the category name.

dave

Don't shoot me, but could you please change "Park" to "Parks & Arboreta"? (I think I've tweaked just about all of them now...)

I was putting botanical gardens and arboreta under the public gardens category--they seem much more like that than like a park. Or maybe my definition of a park is different...to me a park is someplace you go in general to enjoy nature, and public gardens (and botanical gardens and arboreta) are places that were specifically built to showcase plants. So how are we supposed to be defining these?

Call me a thickie but I don't understand what the co-ordinates are for. I've just entered a public garden, went through the rigmarole of goggle maps and like others in that section it just looks like a plain listing, isn't something supposed to show up or have I not got the point of the exercise?

There is a map feature if you use the search by zip code feature, it will pop up a little map showing where the places are that are close to your zip code. I'm not sure how this would work for international locations though.