Creating a searchable A-Z listing of hundreds of companies/services

I am about to create a webbased guide. A guide that will list numerous of companies – their services, contact information and so on. And I need help coding this!

I am using Genesis News Child Theme and I want the following (have looked into Custom Post Types UI and taxonomies but need to develop this further!). It is all really quite straight forward – you are looking for a product/serviece, you need to be able to evaluate if you should contact this company, if yes, you want to know who to call, what they are offering you.

This is the information that need sto be POSSIBLE but not mandatory necessary to add to each post:

1. Company name (which should be listed as an A-Z list of companies

2. Company logo (I am thinking in the sidebar area but not necessary) linked to URL

3. Company text description

4. Company contact details (here it should be possible to add several contact persons – if there is one KAM for public sector, one for Production industry and so on)

5. TAGS – for what they are offering – these (or made in another way) need to be searchable. Let’s say that a company is looking for providers that sell a certain product/service, in a specific market, for their particular industry. This is key – how to make key word searchable making it possible for users to search for a shortlist of about 10 perfect match companies among maybe houndreds!

6. Customer references (this could simply be links to PDF:s, but need to be shown visibly)

7. A list of features/functions that can be ”marked”/”unmarked” (these are commonly asked for features/functions) to help select a solution best suitable for the company searching for it

8. Recent posts – a company will be able to add an article to the forum, these should be able to track here.

9. A rating system! Functionality/Price/User friendlyness/Service level (in order to be able to rate each company there needs to be a control system – either emailing us, logging in as a member, being forced to add name and contact number (thus making it possible for us to remove false identities)

I tried to upload images to help show ideas about what I mean but I didn’t make it. I need the perfect code to do this! Who can help me?

Thank you!