If you are thinking of creating a directory website then you need to think carefully about how you are going to do it as often they are not cheap and may require a lot of hard work to start with before you start to see any benefit.
Many people have great ideas about building a directory for people to search for suppliers or companies that can offer the services or products they need but these types of sites need to be designed in such a way that they are extremely user friendly and that there is a reason to use your directory above others. It can also be tricky to get directory websites ranked on the search engines, so you will need to consider how you are going to market it on and ongoing basis.
You need to consider how you are going to make any money off the site. Some people choose to let people add their business for free to the directory and then make money from selling advertising space on their site others will charge businesses a subscription fee to be listed on the site. Getting the initial subscriptions can be hard as you will not be able to prove that they will get much traffic through initially.