New Site is LIVE!

Firstly a quick well done to the team, developers and support staff!

I have been running a couple of magazine, news and directory sites for nearly 4 years, I have been designing sites for over 10 years, I thought I would give some insight into running these sites and the plugin you and I have brought…

If you think its going to be easy, its not!

The price we have paid for this plugin and the opportunity it can offer is amazing, I have used nearly every other directory theme, plugin and even tried building something myself, this includes – Geoplaces, Sabai, WordPress Directory, Directory Press etc etc…

They all mostly promise an out of the box yelp beating directory in hours, most are a nightmare to work with, coded badly and don’t have a support team nearly everything I tried in the past wouldn’t do what I wanted – which is have a simple directory.

I settled on Geotheme – this did what I wanted but I didn’t like the overall feel of thing for my news and magazine site, but it worked well for nearly 2 years – the NEW plugin seemed perfect for my needs and is now currently live on my site – http://www.floorinsite.com.

I think what some of us have to remember is that we are buying a plugin – most of the issues we will have will be server related or our theme or more importantly our misunderstanding lol

I had to change and test things constantly to get to the point of where I am at the moment, I will share a few of the problems I had and hope it helps, I have also included a guide of how I do things, I know when I started years ago, I did things very wrong and it cost me months in time, thousands in money and almost my sanity… but I learnt from nearly every mistake.. nearly 😉

The following is how I do things, they are my thoughts and ideas, they are not necessarily right, also I have mentioned some of the things that caused me problems and observations that I think users or designers may have problems with:

1) I would say you have to have a clean install, I run two test sites and a live site as listed below, my first attempt with GD was an old test site, the plugins all installed but I noticed problems straight away, second attempt on a fresh install of wordpress was fine.

– Install on a fresh copy of wordpress – as a side note I set up GD without any plugins turned on all apart from the GD ones of course – I did this on all three test sites.

I worked off of three test sites:

A – Basic test site – everything gets tested here – if it breaks it breaks – this is still backed up every 6 hours – when I’m building a new site.

B – Main test site – this is meant to be the site which could go live, any final changes and testing are done here, ideally this would be copied across to the live site when finished, also backed up every 3 – 6 hours.

C – Live site.

2) The most important thing I would recommend is to learn how to check the CSS styles in firefox and then how to change the style sheet or add a child template and do changes there – Paolo wrote a great piece a while ago on how to use firefox and it taught me what to do (its in a geotheme post, I am no longer a member there, but I’m sure someone has a link) – this is just my view but until you know and understand CSS, I feel you could struggle and spend an awful lot of time trying to work out simple things, its one of the best things I did, trust me, its not as hard as you think and it will open your eyes to allow you to change almost anything quickly on your site from colours to spacing, its the quickest way to find and fix problems.

3) BACK UP to different points as you work – ALWAYS – I also use a staging site when working with new plugins, I also back up any files that I change off line, I finally make a note in a doc off changes made to the css just in case!

4) I had problems when trying to mix widgets in the themes pages and the plugins pages so – Only use the themes side widgets with the themes pages and only use the plugin widgets with the plugins pages.

5) I managed to upload my CSV using Vikas instructions, only uploading 250 at a time – I wrote a bigger piece under my CSV post.

6) The plugin and theme both used the flex slider – I had to remove a few sections from both the theme style sheet to get the pictures right and not stretch across the page and also the spacing below the places picture and gallery – Also I had to remove the word ‘hidden’ in the plugin’s css to allow the flex slider in the theme to work – firefox will show you how to do this as per my post 2.

7) Sidebars – ouch… this gave me some trouble, I had to set up different sidebars to be used by the theme ( if i used the standard theme sidebars they would also be used in the plugin sidebar areas with or without the option turned on or off in geodirectory, basically I would have the GD sidebar and then the themes sidebar and also the narrow sidebar widgets all used – I still have a few little issues here – I will update as I go.

TIP – When I first Started out I found putting a text box at the top of every sidebar in the widget section and typing the name of the widget in the title area ie. ‘GD Listing top section’ showed me what pages and where the sidebar was.

Tip – Some themes won’t have an option for additional sidebars – so you might have to get an additional plugin to do this, if needed.

8) On the subject of widgets, For some reason the plugin broke some of my normal theme widgets but only on some pages and some categories, on other posts it would be fine – easy fix – I’m not using that widget now.

9) Category icons – I am still having problems here a little, I know there is an update today which I hope will fix this area – everything with the icons was fine – when I moved to the main site I found nearly all icons had disappeared, I was using two different ones across 28 categories, I had the same problem in geotheme, I decided to rename the same icon for each different category and upload so they all have a different image – there is a trick to getting rid of the error for category images and icons – I found you have to try and delete twice (get the error message up) then refresh the screen.. don’t come out of the category and go back in as the error will still be there, you have to refresh the screen then the image and error will go.

My issue is that I have deleted the old icon and uploaded a new one to my workwear category, I have purged the server and browser but the icon still shows, even though its not there anymore lol… I hope the update will fix this later.

Im going on to much now… so I will finish with the two things I think should be addressed, one is in the update later.

1) I must be able to write in the category description area – this is where I place my targeted advertising – its a must for selling.

2) GD search has taken over all my search boxes on the theme including the themes own search boxes, its good and bad, its good as its brings the directory into the main theme but I would like that to come secondly to editorial and features results – its a tough one.

I hope some of this makes sense and it helps even one user, as I said at the start its hard work setting up and then even harder running but you can make a lot of money if you get it right!

My site http://www.floorinsite.com is one of a few sites I do, it has over 2,500 stories, 5,000 places, features, videos, tenders and gets around 20,000 visits a month, I also do a digital magazine version which backs up and promotes the site – it includes all the top stories and features from the past month on Floorinsite.

The site is updated with at least one news story and place daily.

Thats was longer then I thought 😉

Dave