A living reference for visitors, contributors, business owners, communities, travelers, and the site team. For task-specific answers, see the public Help center.
Everyone
Getting Started
What My Home Kansas is
My Home Kansas is a Kansas-focused directory and local guide for restaurants, things to do, events, shops, places to visit, community pages, local experiences, and trip planning.
Finding a place
Browse by category, browse a community page, or use search. Individual listing pages are the authoritative page for a specific place or business and connect to its category, community, related listings, and official website.
Accounts
Public browsing does not require an account. An account lets people save listings and trips, submit information, leave reviews where supported, and participate in approved contributor workflows.
Data quality
Listing information is built from submissions and researched sources. Business hours and other time-sensitive details can change, so official websites remain the best source for current operational information.
Back to topUsers
Saving, Profiles, and Personal Use
Save a listing
Use the Save this listing control on a restaurant, place, event, or other directory record. Saved listings are available from the account area.
Plan and save trips
The trip planner can build an itinerary from structured preferences or a natural-language request. A signed-in user can save the resulting trip and return to it later.
Your account
Account information is used to associate saved items and user-created content with the correct person. Never put passwords, payment information, API keys, or other secrets into public content.
Back to topContributors
Submitting a Place, Business, Event, or Story
Start with the real entity
Use the real official name, correct address, city, website, phone, hours, and category whenever those facts are available.
Write for people
Describe what the place actually is, what a visitor can do there, and useful details that distinguish it from similar places. Do not repeat city names or keywords unnaturally.
Use reliable sources
Official business or organization websites are preferred for current contact details, hours, menus, reservations, and other operational facts. Firsthand community knowledge can add context when it is clearly identified.
Review before publication
Submitted material may be reviewed, corrected, consolidated, rejected, or taken down. The goal is one useful page for each real-world entity rather than a collection of duplicate records.
Back to topBusiness Owners
Business Listings and Claims
Claim an existing listing
If your business already has a My Home Kansas listing, claim that record instead of creating another copy. Claims are reviewed before management access is granted.
Keep one authoritative record
A strong business listing has one canonical URL, accurate name, category, address, phone, hours, coordinates, official website, description, and useful imagery when available.
Official website
The official site link gives visitors a path to current menus, reservations, hours, events, and other information that can change more quickly than a directory record.
What makes a listing useful
Accurate facts, original useful description, appropriate category, photos, reviews, location information, and links to related local information all improve the page for visitors.
Back to topTravelers
Trip Planner
Natural-language requests
The planner now accepts prompts such as “Plan a weekend in Kansas City” or “Plan a day trip in Lawrence with history and dinner.” The prompt is converted into structured trip criteria before the itinerary is built.
Structured planning
The planner also supports destination, starting point, dates, activities, activity times, meals, food interests, budget, pace, party size, and restaurant exclusions.
Use real listings
The planner is designed to use actual My Home Kansas directory records for stops. It should not invent businesses, attractions, or events simply to fill an itinerary.
Verification
Generated itineraries include a reminder to verify hours and other time-sensitive details before traveling.
Back to topSite Team
Search, Listings, and Data Quality
One real entity, one authoritative page
Duplicate listings dilute the usefulness of the directory and can create conflicting information. We should consolidate duplicate records and keep a canonical listing URL.
Local relevance
A strong listing clearly identifies the entity, what it is, where it is, and why someone might visit. City, address, category, official name, alternate names, hours, coordinates, and useful description all contribute to clarity.
Internal links
Listings connect to their city page, category page, related local places, and trip-planning paths. Link text should describe the destination instead of relying on generic labels such as “click here.”
Structured data
Where the underlying facts support it, listing pages expose appropriate schema.org data such as Restaurant, Store, TouristAttraction, or Event. The visible page content and structured data should agree.
Images
Real listing photos are preferred. When a listing has no suitable image, it remains published with an intentional category graphic rather than being withheld from the directory.
No manufactured relevance
Content should be created because it helps Kansas visitors. We should not create keyword-stuffed pages, doorway pages, artificial link networks, or thin duplicate content merely to influence search results.
Back to topDocumentation
How This Guide Is Maintained
Single source of truth
This guide is intentionally organized as a set of audience-specific articles in one source file so the public documentation can be updated without maintaining duplicate copies of the same explanation.
What should stay private
Database credentials, authentication secrets, recovery codes, private customer information, internal security details, and other sensitive operational material should never be published in the public guide.
Future admin documentation
The next layer should be an authenticated administration manual covering database tables, API routes, research jobs, moderation workflows, deployment procedures, and troubleshooting. That material belongs behind the admin login rather than on a public SEO page.
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