0
City Guide - a directory based Wordpress theme
In recent theme releases, we’ve been exploring a few niche environments, instead of the standard business or magazine theme possibilities, in the hope that we can grow the long tail of our themes collection. Based on the success of Postcard, we’ve thus decided to give the geo-location arena another go, with the release of the smashing City Guide theme.
City Guide’s design was masterfully crafted by popular web designer, Sam Brown, who we worked with towards the end of last year (yes: quality takes time). The design itself is shiny in all the right places and Sam did a great job of delivering the Apple influences that we requested, without limiting this theme as an open canvas to morph to your own needs.
The Implementation
Where this theme really starts shining through, is in it’s niche implementation of being a location-based directory.
Using the Google Maps API again, the theme allows you to publish significant landmarks, tourist attractions & restaurants (whatever location you want) in a location-based directory. In our opinion, the theme will work best when used for one specific region, city or even small towns, but it would most definitely also work if you wanted to publish listings anywhere in the world.
The great thing about all of this, is that the extra geo-location bits are integrated into your WordPress write panels, so adding that information just takes a few extra seconds. You can have a look at City Guide’s write panel here:
Your custom City Guide write panel
In addition to the Google Maps functionality, we’ve also integrated the very popular WP-PostRatings plugin. So all of your listings will have an automated rating service enabled if you have the plugin installed.
Making Money
Since this theme sports such a niche purpose, we also believe that the possibility to make money off it is increased. Beyond the different advertising spaces that are scattered throughout the theme, it also offers endless possibilities in terms of selling products & services via affiliate links. Consider this:
If you’ve got a few massive tourist attractions in your directory (powered by City Guide of course), you can include affiliate links to their respective websites and earn commissions when your readers buys some tickets from them.
So whilst we’re definitely not pro’s at affiliate marketing (or creating location-based directories for that matter…), we can surely see a lot of potential here and we’re excited to see some of our users exploiting that!
Mmmm... the City Guide home page design
Enough from us though… Check out the detailed specs for City Guide here or have a little play with the demo. Also – never forget to tell us what you think of our latest release! 
A teljes bejegyzés elolvasása
