Managing The Business Directory

Contents

1. Adding New Directory Entries
2. Updating Directory Entries
   • Search for an existing entry
   • Scheduling a change or working on a draft
3. Categorizing Directory Entries
4. Adding Business Hours
5. Setting the Map Marker Location
6. Adding Extra Photos

1. Adding New Directory Entries

To learn more about the basics of adding and editing posts using the WordPress editor, click here.

Navigation Path:

• Directory -> Add New

Fields:

• Title – Title of the event, shown in the directory listing, category pages, and usually on the single directory item page.
• Content – Located below the title, shown on the single directory item page. May also be used for the “Excerpt” if none specified.
• Excerpt – Quick summary of the event, between 20 – 80 words. Shown on directory listing and category pages.
• Featured Image – Shown on the single event item page, category pages, and directory listings.
• Categories – Used to organize the business and group it with similar businesses.
• Features – Used to tag features of the business, e.g. pet friendly, handicap accessible, etc.
• Contacts – Specifies one or more ways to reach the business, every contact has:
  • Type, like: Email, Phone, Website, Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, or Name
  • Value: The value for the field.¹Email, phone, and website + social fields will smart format themselves if possible. E.g. a phone number like 276 236-8226 will become (276) 236-8226 and we attempt to turn email and website into links.
  • Custom Label: If you’d like to apply your own label to a contact you can do so here, e.g. Cell instead of Phone.
• Display In Order Specified? – Determines whether contacts are grouped together and displayed in the same order on every directory entry. If checked contacts will display in the order you set. ²If “Name” contact types are present, this option applies whether you check it or not. So that you can group contacts by an associated contact name.
• Address – Business address, city & state are required.
• Hours – Allows you to specify one or more sets of business hours.
• Map – Allows you to set a marker for the business on a map.
• Photos – Allows you to add extra photos to be displayed with the business.

2. Updating Directory Entries

Navigation Path:

• Directory -> All Directory

When creating or editing directory entries, pay attention to the directory URL. If the URL ends in “-2” or “-3” or any variation of that, e.g. www.example.com/business/my-business-6 that’s a sign a business with the same name may already exist.

In that case, consider choosing another name for your directory entry, or finding the existing entry and updating it instead.³If you rename your entry, make sure to update the directory URL by clicking the Business -> URL field and changing it to match your new entry name.

Search for an existing entry

Go to Directory -> All Directory then in the search box, enter your entry name and click Search Directory to find existing entries with the same name.

Scheduling a change or working on a draft

If you would like to schedule a change to an entry, you can rewrite & republish the post, optionally scheduling it to change out in the future.

3. Categorizing Directory Entries

Developing an effective categorization scheme for a directory can be an art as much as a science, some general principles for categorization are:

• Don’t over-categorize, it’s better to have a handful of large categories than many small ones. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t think of more than 3 events that could fit into a category, you should choose an existing one instead, if possible.
• Use sub-categories, if a directory category is small with only a handful of events, place it under a relevant parent category. E.g. Dining -> Lunch. This allows search engines and visitors to explore the site with more context.⁴Change a categories’ parent by going to All Directory -> Categories then click the category and choose a parent. If you’re changing a category with a large number of links to it on the site or elsewhere, you may want to setup a redirect to keep the old link working.

4. ADDING bUSINESS hOURS

Adding Hours:

• Click Add Row and fill in the fields listed.

Removing Hours:

• Hover over the hours row you want to remove and click the .

5. sETTING tHE mAP mARKER lOCATION

• Go to the Map tab and enter the address of the business.
• If the marker position isn’t quite right, you can click the map to move it.
• The marker description will display the Excerpt you set.

6. aDDING eXTRA pHOTOS

• Go to the Photos tab and click Add to gallery
• You can drag and drop photos in the gallery to reorder them, remove them with the , or use the Bulk Actions dropdown to sort them in various ways.