We have received a number of comments from people wondering if this is strictly a ‘business’ tool.
The answer is ‘No’.
Business Directory for Wordpress can be used for any yellow-pages style directory. Here are a few examples and suggestions. If you are a web developer, these might help you make suggestions for your clients. If you know of someone who fits one of these categories, please tell them about our plugin. If you have a suggestion, add it to the comments.
Business Directory: Of course this can be used as a directory of business that belong to a region, or a vertical market. For instance, Utah Valley Business Blog uses the plugin to invite Utah Valley businesses to participate in their listing. You could easily use this plugin to build a directory of ‘Florida Companies’ or ‘Fence Companies’ or ‘Great places to find arts and crafts’, depending on your blog subject.
Membership: You might use this plugin to create an online list of your group membership. For instance ‘all the companies that belong to the Save The Belltower organization’, or for a local Chamber of Commerce.
Groups: This plugin makes a great way to enable the members of your group to pitch their business or affiliation. For instance a local Kiwanis group or a local BNI group. Groups can also be temporary such as ‘participating groups’ for a local event or sponsorship.
Church Groups: We have actually heard from some church groups using the Business Directory for Wordpress plugin to enable their local church membership to post their businesses. This is a great way to support your local economy and help promote the members of your local church.
Sponsorships: This is also a great way to gain and post sponsorships. As you approach companies for a sponsorship, you can add them to the directory.
Clubs: A presence in the ‘club’ business directory can be presented as a major perk for participation. For example, everyone in our cycling club gets to post their business in our club business directory.
Affiliations: The listings don’t always have to be business oriented; you could, for example, list affiliate clubs, organizations or businesses. If you happen to be a Bike Shop, you could easily list all the local affiliate bike clubs.
MLMs: We have seen a few Multi-level Marketing organizations use the plugin to list all the members of a ‘downline’. This effectively increases search engine optimization and helps raise the attention given to the members of a specific group.
Any other ideas? Let us know in the comments! And please pass the word along to anyone you can think of who might be interested in using our plugin. Thanks!
23 Comments
Yes this is a very useful plugin and thanks a bunch for it.
Is there a way to categorize the items in the directory? Like a directory script of any kind would do? What about SEF URLs for these cateories and also a details page for each listing. If not, these would be a great addition to this plug-in. It could then actually compete with “pay” directory scripts out there.
A friend is looking for a way to build a community site with lots of news and business listings
he wants to give a free one line entry and then charge for a bigger entry – whether for more lines or a box entry or a full page.
Could an upgraded version of your plugin be used or would you customise for a fee?
Thanks
Alex
Your Business Directory is almost what we’re looking for — we’ll wait till you complete the new premium Business Directory and we’ll see if it meet our needs. However, we’re also interest in “White Directory” — where we could list our members (and non-members) with names, address, number, and/or email address. However, we would like the ability to print them and we could make a small phone directory.
Members (and non-members) data will come from our web-based membership program (which will be linked to our WordPress).
Am I missing something here? Does this plugin alert the administrator, by email, when someone has uploaded their business information. This would be helpful. I would not want to have to check everyday for listings to moderate.
Having just downloaded this, I noticed that there is no licensing information in any of the files, or copyright for that matter. You might want to add something in the next release.
Greetings!
Thanks for putting this together… I can see several uses already for it but I have a very pressing need at the moment which I think your plugin might be the answer for…
(1) We need to build a glossary on our WordPress blog … can you envision using your plugin for that? Any thoughts?
(2) Presently we don’t want all visitors to be able to submit ‘definitions’ into the glossary… can we turn off the user submitting feature?
(3) And finally, can the latest entries appear on the blog’s home page?
Once again thank you very much for the plugin and also in anticipation of your answer.
Regards,
Jose
Very cool but I’m suddenly getting lots of problems
First, I’m getting a 404 here; hence my comment: http://businessdirectory.squarecompass.com/documentation/
I’m in desperate need of help with my version of the directory having only recently corrupted. The DIV tags clearly aren’t working with the blog sidebar falling to the bottom and formatting of the directory stripped (no breaks between listings).
The only changes made are additions to the directory.
Are there characters that can’t be used in listings such as & or ;? I appreciate your prompt support as this is live and actively used.
Hello, I am Busniss-installing your plugins directory. I’m trying to translate the form into Spanish and I can not.
I can not find the form code to translate.
If you can help me.
(Machine Translation from Spanish made google)
This is a great plugin, thank you, I am working on my site and I am planning to ad this plugin,
I have a couple of questions;
It is possible to upload pictures and make some changes on the form?
What would be the charge if I need those changes on the plugin, do you work as a freelance?
Thank you
Regards
Ron
Is there a way that will allow one to create an area for the address of the business. Would seem to me, that upon a business filling out the address on the registeration form, it would appear in their listing. Perhaps I am missing something. Anyone help the xhtml impaired.
Regards,
Bryce
I have just installed and translated your plugin to swedish. Also modified the output to include complete address information. Added Google Map for each address.
The next thing that I would like to see is a posibillity to send e-mails to all members to be used for a newsletter.
Matching Businesses with Customers
The internet brings enormous potential for marketing your business and just about everything your business has to offer; the networking has just begun.
Business directories have become an effective way for the public to express opinions, make comments and select the appropriate business to deal with. On the same hand, business directories offer the business a great opportunity to advertise and get enormous internet exposure. For businesses that increase their exposure and generate interest through listings in business directories has become the smart thing to do. The powerful marketing tool of business directories will be enjoyed by the innovative public for a long time to come.
Businesses that use internet business directories enable them to receive instantaneous feedback. Enhancing the relationship with a customer can increase business success. Customers always look for the opportunity to give feedback to the business and the internet business directory has made it a great quality control avenue. Scary? Not for the business that is willing to adapt and market their business with this technology.
For marketing and promotion, the internet business directory has become an important part of business strategy.
I hope categories are in store for a future release. For example, being able to list something in the “Food & Dining” or “Pets” or “Insurance” category would make the directory much easier to browse than just by alphabet. My two cents…
Hi, I am hoping that the prem version will include a few extras such as categories and a details page maybe. Thanks for the free version though – it’s great to get me started (I just donated so I hope it helps a little towards speeding prem version along:-) )
Do you have a release date in mind for it? I love the idea and it works as clean and fast as you like on my site so far (a-fishing.net – I just added it to your example directory).
Great Job on this Plugin! I am currently modifying it to include the following function that I am sure many others could use:
Multiple Directories with a single plugin interface
For Example, a Site might have:
Retail Business Directory
Professional Business Directory
Service Business Directory
Arts & Crafts Business Directory
Musician Business Directory
So each Directory page would have it’s own submission form to submit only to that directory. I’m also modifying the plugin to allow Images, Videos (via YouTube) and Logos to be uploaded. The FREE listing will allow just the text, logo and a single image. The Premium listing will allow unlimited images, Videos and Text. Also, I’ve added an email notification system and a user submission editor.
My friend Hani is actually helping me with all this (haniATnetcetraDOTnet), so if its ok with you both, would you like me to send the code to you for inclusion in future releases?
For anyone needing modification of this (or any) Wordpress Plugin or Theme, I would recommend Hani’s company at netcetraDOTnet. Great prices, super fast turn around and a real knack for wordpress and open source in general.
Man I wish I would have found this before I spend thosands of a custom script for my local business directory….
WOW! I’ve been waiting for something like this for years. Thanks a lot for your work.
Just checking in on the status of the premium version. We sure could use the additional features! Thanks and love the plugin.
Im really interested in this plugin and was curious when an ungraded version would be available. Im looking to have mine be a paid business directory and it would be be great to have the ability to accept payment included in the next version. Thanks, Todd
This is exactly what I was looking for. Is there a way to add an image to each listing?
This a great plug-in. Thanks for sharing. I wasn’t aware it was avaialble.
I have used FocalMedia’s PowerSeek on my Essex business directory. It works OK, although a real pig to modify some parts, and I am starting to think that I could have built the directory with something less expensive!