You may be wondering why this website exists and how it came about. It was not a straight path I can assure you.
In 2021, I got the idea to create a website to be a directory for people to use to find businesses in Meridian, Mississippi. Several new Facebook pages such as Queen City Social and Queen City Business had been created and were gaining a lot of fans. But there is one major downside to Facebook pages & groups: Every post has a shelf-life. If you post something on Facebook, then as soon as someone else posts, your post gets moved down in the timeline. Facebook requires constant attention whether you are creating and managing your own page or posting to various groups.
For example, if you want to post something about your business in Queen City Business, it will be seen for a short time and then as time passes, your post gets seen fewer and fewer times. Unless you post constantly which can get annoying very fast. Additionally, there’s not a lot of room for telling about what your business does, listing your hours of operation or posting a menu of your most delectable treats. Fewer and fewer people are using physical phone books and if you search on the internet, you might find the information you are looking for and you might not. How can you trust the reviews written by complete strangers whether they are positive or negative.
Anyway, my hope at the time was to create a site where every business could get a listing for free and create a virtual marketplace where you could search for any kind of business and see what your options were. Then we started coming out of the pandemic, my own business started getting busy, I ran into some hurdles with the original design I was working with and quite frankly, the project I started with vim and vigor, fizzled.
Fast forward a year to the fall of 2022, when one of our big box stores decided to close and many people began posting their concern about the loss of this business. What was more surprising to me is that many of the products and services offered by this big box store were also offered by local businesses which were in Meridian before the big box store came and would still be here after the big box store was gone. When I discovered many people were simply unaware of the fact that these local options existed made me realize my original directory idea was still valid, but it needed some updating to get a bigger message across:
Before You Buy Somewhere Else, Try Local First!
I’m not asking people to stop shopping with Sam’s or Walmart or Amazon. All I’m asking is that everyone give the local businesses a chance to earn your loyalty before you give it to some unknown corporation far, far away. Those big box stores are not the ones sponsoring baseball teams and they are not going to provide the same level of personalized service that you can get from your neighbor.
So, my initial idea for providing a simple, free business directory is alive again but now it’s infused with a mission expanded to include all of East Mississippi as well.
Welcome To:
If you have a business and want a free listing, start here.
If you want to search for a locally owned business, start here.
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[…] can read the post “So How Did We Get Here?” to learn about the journey this website took to become a reality. However, I wanted to take […]