How would you like to hold the keys to your very own personal business directory website? I have here a little article about three WordPress themes that can help you create that sort of a website. These yelp clones will make it possible – as is always the case with WordPress – to craft a business directory site easily. The AppThemes Vantage, InkThemes Geocraft, and GeoTheme are those 3 professional WordPress business directory listing themes that the title promises you.
1. AppThemes Vantage
Vantage is a straight-to-the point responsive business directory theme for WordPress that is easy to set up. The theme comes packed with essential features for the task and allows you to earn a passive-recurrent income while at it.
Vantage Listings Features
Single listings have a page where details are displayed – everything from location, contact info, pictures, web info and so on. Vantage also has a custom form builder that allows inserting new fields into those pages, thus expanding the details section in a customized way and making Vantage flexible in all info situations.
Monetization
You can set up priced plans with Vantage – each of those plans could have different features and benefits that in turn relate to their cost. It’s up to you what you charge. You can also use the “claim listings” strategy which encompasses you uploading or inserting a bunch of listings into your business directory website, and then charging business owners a fee for those listings.
What about the Users
The Vantage user dashboard is a command center for all listings-related information on your site. Each user has access to all their stats, reviews, contact information etc. Since you as an administrator are a sort of user too, you have a dashboard as well where you can manage the general features of your site with ease. Users can also leave five-star reviews, and business owners can respond to them in the next version of Vantage. The “favorite listings” function is available too – it means that users can set a listing as their favorite and return to it every once in a while, so they wouldn’t forget!
Other Vantage Features
Vantage has a cool search function that makes it possible for people to define a search radius (either by zip code or by city), and make use of the Vantage category filtering. The theme supports a lot of WordPress widgets such as popular categories, related categories, recent reviews, listings and more. Google Maps function is also available – in the form of a map widget accompanying the listing pages. It’s getting tight already, so I’ll mention a few more features that may interest you – Vantage has a built-in PayPal gateway, the AppThemes Api for developers; the theme supports uploading PDFs and images, retaining the blog section, and making use of child themes.
More info – Demo
2. InkThemes GeoCraft Business Directory Listing Theme
Similarly to the Vantage theme, GeoCraft is easy to set up too, works as a responsive theme on mobile apps, and has pretty much the same features as Vantage, even though GeoCraft is mainly meant to set up business listings based on cities – so it’s more concentrated which is not a bad thing.
So, How Does It Work
The idea behind GeoCraft is the same as is with any WordPress business directory listing theme – to input listings, and to make money. People can register on your site via the registration are, they also get their own dashboard where they can view their listings, edit stuff, and – if they’re premium users – collect customer lead information with the help of the GeoCraft lead capture system.
GeoCraft Listings
Listings can be added either manually as a custom post type or by importing a CSV file. Business listings can be shown via a custom widget as well. Like it was with Vantage, there’s a specific page for single listings, the custom information of which can be complemented with the addition of custom fields. City-based Google Maps support is there to lend a hand as well. At the bottom of each listing there are sliders displaying featured and related listings. Listings can be searched for with the relatively basic search function which enables specifications by name and by location.
Making Money with GeoCraft
The key word here is once again “membership packages”. The built-in payment gateway is PayPal and you can use it to facilitate payments ranging from priced one-time and recurring listings. The features and the cost of the packages are, however, up to you. The really cool thing about GeoCraft is the “call to action” button which is basically a bright button on your business directory listings home page that invites people to submit listings for a price. It’s simple – only a click of a button.
User Features
Aside from the information I mentioned above, users can also review businesses in a five-star manner. There’s also a user rating system in GeoCraft.
More GeoCraft Features
GeoCraft supports multiple languages if you have a language file, and enables you to set a default currency. The widget area supports adding video widgets and widgets showing user reviews and featured listings for more variation. There are also a bunch of color themes available for you to choose if you want to give your site a paint makeover.
More info – Demo
3. GeoTheme Global WordPress Business Directory Theme – Yelp Clone Script
When I say global business directory, I mean exactly that. This yelp clone script enables you to add unlimited locations into a single global directory – you could even put the whole world there I suppose! When you add countries to that global directory with GeoTheme, you can start drilling down through cities to neighborhoods – that’s how specific you can get. The cool part of it all is the fact that the geo-location of every event or place can be displayed on a GeoTheme-custom map which uses the Google Maps V3 API and uses ajax calls to improve page loading time. For example, when a user (who has shared their location with the application) browses for an event or place, GeoTheme automatically redirects them to the closest location and enables them to do proximity searches, greatly reducing the effort of drilling down from the globe. All of these features can be used on a mobile app.
GeoTheme Features
I’ll start off by saying that there is a definite way of making money with this WordPress business directory theme. People can create accounts easily on your business directory site – they can use their existing social accounts to log in or maintain it as their account on your site. Users can log in via Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Yahoo, and then expand their profiles as well by adding extra fields of info. Supporting several payment gateways such as PayPal (as well as PayPal recurring payments), Authorize.net, Google Checkout, 2Checkout, WorldPay, the theme be used to set up different payment categories restricting or allowing various features of submissions. The application tracks each transaction (found on the dashboard), and allows you to insert coupon codes as well to run promotions and attract additional users.
GeoTheme Listings Functions
In order to create a global business directory with this yelp clone, you need to have listings -and you can add them as custom post types. You can then set filters on these listings by adding custom fields to a category, for example. The GeoTheme WordPress business directory theme makes it possible and very user-friendly to add several sub-categories to a main category, so users could speed up their search process. Categories can have their icons and images as well. Users that have their own listings in your WordPress business directory can use Google Analytics to see how much traffic they are getting – this function necessary for the users to maintain belief in your site, and why they are paying you.
Other GeoTheme Features
When we are talking about events, then some of them tend to take place weekly, monthly, or simply put, systematically. GeoTheme yelp clone enables you to set some events as “recurring events”, so fresh content will be added to your site continuously. Place owners can claim listings and take full control of their reviews, being able to answer comments and manage other things. Images can be attached to reviews too! GeothTheme allows you to make use of social sharing buttons as well – Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Mass uploading of places and events is also supported by GeoTheme – just use a CSV file.
More info – Demo
Prices
The AppThemes Vantage is $99 for a standard package which allows you to install Vantage on unlimited sites, has lifetime support and updates regularly. You may also pick the developer package which is $159 and comes in addition to everything else mentioned with Photoshop PSD files.
GeoCraft costs $97 – this includes all sorts of manuals and theme documentation, as well as lifetime support, plus the license to install the theme on as many sites as you wish.
GeoTheme alone with 2 additional child themes + 6 months of updates and support costs you $85. This license will enable you to install the GeoTheme yelp clone on unlimited sites. The GeoTheme iPhone app license – which is $350 – allows you to make your GeoTheme copy responsive, so it could be used and viewed in mobile devices. You can also upgrade from your theme only package to the iPhone App license for $300. Applying for several additional upgrades by ThemeTailors is possible, but will cost you extra.
There you have it – 3 professional WordPress business directory listing themes.