Building an Online Directory with WordPress
A few months ago I was approached by an existing client to build a 5-year old brain child of his, an online directory of user uploaded Luxury Rental Listings (exotic rental cars, yachts charters, mansions, private jet charters, limos). Click here to see my company's online web design portfolio and our work on the site. He came up with the idea of this directory solely of luxury listings a few years ago and had worked with a number of other web developers and no one could seem to get the website working properly.
Previously I built another site for this client that he absolutely loved, and when I was done, he decided to present me with the opportunity to build what I like to call a “Kobayashi Maru” of a website.
Now I know that an online directory seems like a relatively easy thing to build considering there are tons of them out there, Expedia, Online Yellow Pages, and even Craigslist.
But even though these sites come a dime a dozen, what most people don’t consider is the fact that it probably cost a pretty penny to build those sites and you can’t imagine how difficult it is to build a proper filtering system. And the additional layer of obstacles for me to build an online directory in particular was that I only build sites in WordPress.
So now that you have most of the information, you now know why this online directory was incredibly difficult to build. Before I start giving you a few of my secrets to successfully building a user-uploaded directory in WordPress, please know that I understand there are many ways to “skin a cat” and although you may think that you have a better way to do this; hear me out first.
To be frank, there is no way that I can explain all of the inner-workings and logistics of this website vs the client's needs, or we would be here all day. So just know that everything I did had a good reason (including not using any of the Premium WordPress templates for directories out there).
The WordPress Plugin I Used to Build an Online Directory
Lets talk about one of the WordPress plugins I used to build an online directory using that make the filtering system work. I'm referring to the Query Multiple Taxonomies Plugin. This plugin was a life saver.
It allows the site developer to add a widget where site users can execute live searches and filter listings (posts) by taxonomy. For instance, if someone wanted to search luxury listings of mansions for rent in Europe, they could also refine their search to properties with 10 or more bedrooms in a price range of $2,000-$3,000 per night. You can build all sorts of different query from widgets based on taxonomy values of your listings (posts).
Running a Directory in WordPress Drastically Slows Down Your Site Speed – Affecting Your Rankings
Here's How I Tackled the Site Speed Issue
Because this WordPress website was built with about 20 plugins (we needed each and every single one of them), we decided to move to a dedicated server with HostGator. Otherwise, on a shared server the plugins would crash the site every time. And besides we plan to get a lot of traffic anyway 😉 so the digital juice was necessary.
Getting Traffic to an Online Directory
Blog Engage
I signed our online directory up for Blog Engage to get more traffic and incoming links from both social media and other sites. For those of you who do not know, Blog Engage is “a social bookmarking site where people discover, share, vote and discuss interesting and remarkable content they find on the web.”
Since Blog Engage offers packages that give you Just Retweet points as well as the ability to automatically submit your blog posts (and/or listings) via your RSS feed to their site, it helps improve site rankings as well as generate traffic.
So now you have the basics you need to successfully build an online directory. I’m sorry that I couldn't give you all my secrets but this should get you off to a good start to building your online directory in WordPress.
I'd love to hear what you think about all of this, please leave a comment and share your thoughts.
If you are looking to have an online directory website built please feel free to contact my company Lidyr Creative Marketing Agency.