Online directories often resemble mere lists, but they can be powerful content additions that serve to deepen the value of the overall selling proposition by helping users in locating critical, related resources that for the visitor is otherwise much too time consuming.On today's websites, it is not uncommon to find online databases designed to provide the data-hungry website visitor with more comprehensive database management functions which are far superior to list-style directories. At a minimum, we find web-driven data pages that include search and display functions which facilitate quick and easy manipulation of back-end SQL databases.

Many sites also include options to add, edit, delete, print, and even download data directly from the database to the desktop, all enabled with multiple levels of login/password security. While this is not revolutionary, the technical expertise required to build database-driven web pages has been the domain of more sophisticated online publishers who not only owned the back end database outright, but possessed the required expertise to build and maintain such access for their loyal constituents.