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Download Lists of Data For Building Drop Down Menus, Lists of Countries to Makes of Cars Etc

If you are a website designer you'll probably be familiar with the following example of the problematic issue of obtaining lists of data to use in a handy, downloadable format.

Let's imagine that your client approaches you to create a community website for, let's say, a dog owners' club. In this online community, the owners offer mutual time swapping dog-sitting and feeding services to nearby co-members on a mutual no-cost basis.

When a dog owner creates his or her profile, there is likely to be a requirement for a drop-down list or menu, enabling the website visitor to choose from a menu, probably coded thus: example dog breed , another dog breed , and so on.

So, you'd think it would be easy enough to obtain a list of popular dog breeds to create a list for either an SQL database or a simple option tagged list, huh? Think again! Just try if for yourself. Google-up "list of popular dog breeds". You'll find lots of information about dog breeds, not least from Wikipedia and other excellent resources, but there's a whole lot of work involved in creating a usable list from a bunch of hyperlinks on a page.

First you've got to check whether the list is up-to-date and relevant. How? By Googling-up every entry on your list to check its authenticity? Then you'll need to strip out all the hyperlinks, images and all the other trash you don't need to copy into a spreadsheet program to remove duplicates and list everything in its desired order.

This all takes time, and as any designer knows, time is money.

Instead, wouldn't it be nice to find a website where can you use an affordable one-click solution, to download an alphabetically-sorted list of places / items / cars / countries / dog breeds or whatever, ready to copy and paste, right out of the box? Well, the good news is that it's right here (see resource below).

This 'list of lists' website is growing every week, and although still in its infancy, the site is already carrying over 20 lists from airlines through to occupations. The lists are regularly reviewed and updated in response to customer queries and by this time next year there should be several hundred data lists ready to download in varying formats. The site's owners also offer a bespoke list-building service in response to specific queries, which can be surprisingly affordable.

Prices of downloadable data lists from the site vary from US$ 5.00 for really basic lists to ten times that amount for a list containing thousands of entries. There's an RSS feed too, so designers can be kept up to date with any lists that they might need to know about on an ongoing basis. http://www.dropdownlistdata.co.uk

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Download-Lists-of-Data-For-Building-Drop-Down-Menus,-Lists-of-Countries-to-Makes-of-Cars-Etc&id=5303719] Download Lists of Data For Building Drop Down Menus, Lists of Countries to Makes of Cars Etc