Thanks for the replies. People commented a few years ago about all of the blank space below the copyright and disclaimer statements. The black box below all of the text has to "float," depending upon how much text is on a particular page. It's a problem I've been meaning to address, but I haven't yet found a good solution, other than redoing the design of the site.
As for allowing searches by zip code, that's an expensive proposition. And, given that I don't have thousands of shops on the site, it would be an expensive proposition that would give searchers shops that are a very long distance from their location.
I started out cold-calling shops on the site, which was not the best way to add them. Now I have shops contacting me to be on the site. Some are little hole in the wall shops, others are medium to large shops. I manage to retain about 70% of the shops on paid renewals, but lately I've been getting a lot of store owners retiring or dying.
I gave a lot of thought to adding items for sale that the shops carry. I'm now getting anywhere from 14,000 to 17,000 visitors a day, the shops are getting 1,000 to 2,000 or more people a month viewing their ads, and I'm only charging them $100 a year for the ads. They're paying much less than a penny per view, a price they can't get anywhere else. (I'm paying 25 to 50 cents per click with Google for AdWords ads for the products on the site).
So, to cover increasing hosting costs and to make the site a truly profitable venture after four years of work, I decided to add items for sale. As I see it (or justify it, if you view it that way), people are either going to order something online, or they're going to want to see and handle a product. The latter group won't buy from my site, and the former group will be more inclined to go online rather than to a shop.
