Twisting Wordpress Into A Local Area Guide/Directory

CONCEPT:

Create a local area guide and directory, using wordpress as the front housing articles and information integrated with a phpmydirectory (found in /directory) that would contain a complete area business directory. Monetize by selling advertising and sponsorships to local area businesses in addition to some other methods (adsense, travel affiliates, etc) and enjoy.

PROBLEM:

The scope of my project kept getting bigger and bigger as I wanted this guide/directory to generate a large amount of income. All of a sudden, I was unclear how to integrate the concept with Wordpress. Should I use posts/categories/pages? I just wrote about 15 more questions and deleted them for your sake… the point is… there were problems fitting my concept into Wordpress box.

THE DEBATE:

First of all, the best solution is probably to not use Wordpress. It might be best to have something custom made to my specs or use something a bit more flexible. But right now, I’m a one man show with limited resources, so I have to press on.

I started with a magazine style wordpress theme which makes obvious sense and I edited the index.php file to give it a static front look that is essentially a portal with “area overviews” that link to each given “category” or section. Take a few areas that ANY local area directory should have: real estate, entertainment and restaurants.

Unfortunately, if you have the “Real Estate” section as an actual wordpress category, there are some drawbacks.

  1. It will put all your posts in yourdomain.com/category/real-estate
  2. You can change the text “category” to read something like yourdomain.com/custom-word/real-estate but the problem is still the same
  3. We want our main areas to target main keywords and be sort and sweet, increasing the keyword density of the url: yourdomain.com/real-estate
  4. It’s also not as easy to set page title, keywords, description for categories and just creates another hassle.

Categories can’t do this, so we’re left with using either posts or pages. Which one should we use? Well… if we were to make the “real-estate” section simply a “post” and chose %postname% than our post WOULD look like yourdomain.com/postname.

Not so fast… this creates a heckuva lot of problems once we start building out our local area concept a bit more. Your posts have to go in SOME category… would you call it “main sections”? You wouldn’t be able to customize the sidebar for each “area”, extremely limiting your flexibility when it comes to including relevant, targeted content and perhaps more importantly… ad space.

And even further… what happens when our idea expands and we want to start making weekly posts about restaurants, real-estate updates or entertainment happenings around the community?

THE SOLUTION:

Turn your pages into categories. You can easily set each page to utilize a different page template in wordpress: read the tutorial here. Your sidebar templates get called up within the content of the page template, allowing you to call up a custom sidebar.php file you’ve created or embed the sidebar code directly in the page template.

Should you choose, your page could just include the title “Real Estate” and the content could be left blank. The custom page template you use for this page could house all the content, giving you flexibility in the design and allowing you to link out to other pages with more detailed information such as: “homes for sale”, “neighborhoods”, “school districts”, “demographics”, etc… whatever information you want to keep there.

Chances are you will just nest this other content as a page child of the “real estate” section, but if keyword density is important to you, it’s just as simple to make it have no parent and link it out like so.

The difference would be:

Of course, some keyword research might tell you what the best option is… but you should probably stick with a single pattern so you can easily navigate your various pages later on. While keyword density is important, all the links you’ll drive to the site will probably do just fine. Afterall, the density of the “real-estate” section is the most important.

Using this “page” you can also use your custom sidebar to have a “featured realtor” which you will sell in as an advertiser. Link directly to their site or let them have a page hosted on your site. Why not make THEIR page an actual “post” in a “sponsors” category? It will be easy for yourself and visitors to view the site’s sponsors, starting with the newest ones on top! Nonetheless, a customizable sidebar will let you list relevant content in the “real-estate” section without using a page or category… tremendously important.

Perhaps most importantly… this infrastructure will be set up to SCALE. If you want this site to grow and become more than static info, you’ll easily be able to twist it yet again to fit the needs of your growth. How? Thanks for asking…

Simply create categories that mirror the pages you created. I’d replace the “category” term with “articles” to give yourself more of a “fresh” sound. Change around the page template for the section you want, such as “real-estate” to accomodate dynamic content. This is so flexible because you can keep your static content in there, linking to more static content while using the wordpress loop to call up recent posts directly from this category in any format you want.

By any format you want, I mean take a look at the wordpress codex and what other themes do… you could just have your section home display the most recent article with a picture and excerpt as a “featured article”, list other “recent posts” in the sidebar for that section by calling up only posts in that category and have the rest remain the static content that is important to your users for their real estate needs.

It takes some legwork… you’ll be jumping through some hoops… but think about it… the work basically comes in three steps:

If your site grows to the point where you WANT a customized solution, you’ll probably have plenty of capital to pay for it by the time you reach step 3. That’s what I’m hoping for in my own venture. Just make sure your URLS stay the same so you don’t waste all that link juice you’ve built up!

IN SUMMARY:

This exercise has definitely proved to me that this approach is the way to go. I was really contemplating what was the best method and really thinking things through and getting your ideas down on paper helps. I knew this blog had a purpose!

A few more great ideas to get your directory up and running:

Now get off your butt and take over your local area before someone else does! Speaking of which, you’ll probably have a ton of competition to begin with but take a closer look. Usually, you’ll find that your competition has some soft spots. Combine the best elements of all your competition when making your own site. And… exploit the opportunities they haven’t taken advantage of… many of these competitors aren’t SEO savvy and you’ll have a huge edge!

Forums, Forums, Forums!

Ever since the “hard disc disaster” my forums have suffered pretty devastating blows. All the content, posts, member logins, etc… for the past 3 months disappeared. I was left with empty forums that looked dead. Mostly all of the returning contributors called it quits just for this reason - all the great discussion down the toilet.

If you’re interested in College Basketball or Politics (And 2008 Presidential Election) I’m hoping you’ll swing by one of these forums and join in (or start) some conversation back up. When we had the conversation buzzing a bit it was really fun… hopefully you can help me bring back the buzz!

Oh yeah… March Madness is right around the corner… I can’t wait for that! I don’t think my school is going to get in (for the 2nd straight year) and we have a killer team. We also won the national championship in the 2000s. Can you guess what school I went to?

I Hate Internet Explorer Less Than Yesterday

Internet Explorer can be a real S-O-B for web developers. You get your site working perfectly, shoot the link to a friend to check out and, “Uhhh… the site is all messed up looking.” Great…

Internet Explorer renders CSS rules and various commands differently than FireFox and the other browsers. But if that wasn’t enough, two more factors make the troubles even worse:

I had a HUGE problem with a wp theme I was using on several sites that I realized didn’t display properly in Internet Explorer 6. I tried to fix it for days and it took so long mainly because I had to ask other people what the site looked like. A REAAAAAL hassle.

Well, I found a site that helped me out which I think you’ll enjoy: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

Input your website and their “net renderer” will spit out a screen shot of your website in whichever browser you choose almost instantaneously. I’ve seen other services like this, but most were painfully slow. This is a tool you’ll find REALLY handle if you do a lot of wordpress hacking.

In general, people have suggested sending people browsing with IE to a different style sheet using a command in the header - but I’d rather just make it look nice on as many every browsers as possible. This tool was a HUGE help for me in doing that and I think it could help you, too.

If you haven’t tested your sites in other browsers, launch that site up and start checking them one by one. What could be worse than lost revenue to a large chunk of potential visitors simply because your website doesn’t display properly? Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, do the tedious work and fix it up now!

How I Lost (Almost) Everything, And Why You Won’t

I excitedly tore open the envelope which I expected to contain my first sizeable affiliate paycheck. I pulled out the contents, raised it in the air and sure enough… a check for over $10,000. The rush, the adrenaline… the pure excitement felt great.

The phone rang and I answered the call from my mother, “I can’t login to Chef Club… something isn’t working.” Hmmm… okay, showing some type of MySQL error – that’s odd. I instant message my host who says the server probably just needs a reboot. He reboots it… and what follows is an absolute nightmare.

“Your server was compromised… we’re trying to get everything back up and running.” An hour passes,… two hours… five hours….  “We’re doing our best.  We’re going to reload your backup files but it could take a few more hours.”

After 24 hours have passed, the tune changes a bit, “Your server has a bad hard drive and it simply died… it’s gone.” Fortunately, they had kept backups. “When we tried to partition the hard drive and reload your databases, the data was corrupted and automatically deleted.”

But they still had my backups… right? “The corrupted files were your backups.”

They were happy to inform me that they were able to restore the contents of my public_html folder to it’s previous state and only the databases were lost. ONY THE DATABASES? Since I run mainly wordpress and vbulletin sites, EVERYTHING is contained in those databases. All the content, posts, everything… And they were all gone… POOF…. Disappeared.

I changed from a shared server to a dedicated server in late November 2007, shortly after making the decision to resign from my advertising sales job and pursue internet marketing full time. Fortunately, they DID have the MySQL backups from when my sites were on a shared server. And, that makes explaining the loss pretty simple:

Everything I’ve done since I began doing Internet Marketing as a full time job is lost… and all because of a failed hard drive with corrupted backups. I was furious, upset, distraught, stressed and words couldn’t fully express my emotions. My vbulletin forums now appeared completely dead. Time, money, effort and luck went into improving their activity. I had created a dozen or so mini content sites that were now non-existent. And every single news update, blog post, everything content wise… all gone.

I took a couple days off simply because I could not dive back into rebuilding my network without a breath of fresh air. I was too frustrated to start plugging away. So, after a 2 day break, the first thing I did was to conduct some research to put my own “iron-fist” backup system into place.

And that is my message to you: before you do anything else, take a look at they system you use to backup your information. If other people are backing up your information, that’s great, but you need to diversify that backup because if something terrible happens… you need to be covered. And, nobody will put as much effort into making sure you are covered than YOU. Make your own backups.

I went to BestBuy and bought a 1TB external HD with the idea of doing nightly backups. After doing my first full backup, manually, it was a 1.5GB file that took 9 hours to transfer from my dedicated server to my harddrive. Obviously, nightly complete backups are impractical.

There is a backup method called incremental backups or differential backups that only transfer files which are new, updated, changed, etc… it basically transfers the difference between your last backup and your server’s current state. However, incremental backups with MySQL databases are difficult - since the sites are live, if changes are being made as incremental backups occur, it can break the database. And, we don’t need any more problems.

I decided to set up a simple system until I had a more complex system in place:

With this system, the most I would ever lose is a week of backups and there is virtually no chance I could lose everything. If my server messed up, my server backups were corrupted and a fire at my house destroyed my computer, external hard drive and the backup DVDs… I would still have a maximum week old backup at Mozy.

I’m currently working with my hosting provider to do nightly MySQL backups that will get sent to my home computer via FTP and these backups would be incremental. They would be produced by creating MySQL dump files of the databases before backing them up incrementally, so they always include a full, working database that is unbroken and cannot impact the functionality of my websites.

Rsync and RDiff are two open source systems for doing these backups, but you have to technically advanced to set these up. If your hosting provider can backup the files directly to THEIR server, you could get them automatically every night using WGET.

The factor that my backup system currently doesn’t allow for is automation, which is a key to any good backup system. I’m currently working with my host to get this done, and chances are, you might need some help as well. Do some research and see what system might make most sense for you. But, instead of learning from your own mistakes, learn from MY mistakes:

Don’t wait to put a backup system in place until after you need it!

Do it now. The whole point of backups are to ensure safety of your data regardless of the unforeseen disasters that could happen. We know… an unforeseen disaster probably won’t happen to you. You can wait… NO YOU CAN’T.

I waited and I paid the price. Remember… you are running a business. Be accountable for your actions. Prepare yourself for the road ahead. Do your research. Put a system in place. Automate it. Check it to make sure it works. When and if you do have a data meltdown, you won’t feel like “the luckiest person on the planet”… you’ll be happy you’re so damn smart and prepared.

I’m currently trying to rebuild my network of sites and feel like I’m light years behind. I’m so unbelievably overwhelmed it’s ridiculous. Don’t let this happen to you. Protect yourself.

And, if you’re interested in the following topics, I would greatly appreciate your involvement in my forum communities that have experienced tough blows to their vitality:

 Here are some sites that I found useful when doing my backup research:

Alright folks… time to stop feeling sorry for myself, get off my butt and D-I-F-N!