[thelist] Best Practices for building a zip/postal code based dealer locator

[.jeff]

joshua,

 ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
 > At 04:55 PM 9/26/2001, you wrote:
 >
 > Another way, less easy, is to know the geographic center
 > of each ZIP region (longitude and latitude) and the
 > coordinates of each dealership and go from there...
 ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

latitude/longitude for each dealer would be nice, but necessary to build a 
locator.  it would be enough to simply have the zip code and search against 
that.  find all the zip codes within the requested radius of the requested 
zip code.  take that list of zip codes and use them as the search criteria 
for your dealers.

 ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
 > not recommended.
 ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

why?  it's certainly far more accurate than a wildcard search.  in fact, 
there's only one other way that's more accurate and that's to do it via 
driving directions from address a to address b.  isn't the point of a 
dealer locator to give the user an indication of proximity to a given point 
(zip code)?

thanks,

.jeff

http://evolt.org/
jeff at members.evolt.org
http://members.evolt.org/jeff/