Vantage Business Directory Theme Preview
Update! We’ve released Vantage. Please make sure you view the following blog posts to see the current state of this theme and future plans:
- Vantage Beta Launched
- Sound the Trumpets, Vantage is Here!
- Video: Creating a Listing in Vantage
- Vantage Introduces the New AppThemes Custom Form Builder
- Vantage 1.0.1 is Near
- Vantage 1.0.1 Released
- Vantage 1.1 Released
We’ve been quietly working away on a special theme which will be our most advanced WordPress App to-date. Vantage is not your typical business directory. It’s a powerful social networking business directory and can be better explained by breaking it down into three primary pieces:
Local Search
Vantage provides online local search capabilities for site visitors. Typically a visitor will search for a specific thing (i.e. a sandwich shop) and the location (i.e. a specific address, city, state, or zip code). This is all done using the Google Maps API and leveraging geo coordinates since they are the most accurate measure of distance.
Each business listing result contains details such as the business address, hours, website, description, etc. It also includes a 5-point rating system and reviews from other site members which are built up over time. The business owners can directly update their own business’ listing information via the Vantage customer account area.
Listings are organized by city/state and a multi-tier categorization system. Content and listings can also be discovered through categorized reviews or via Vantage member profiles and their review lists.
Community
Having a solid community will help your site grow in leaps and bounds. Vantage automatically does this for you as it ties together user reviews and social networking functionality to create a local online community. Allowing your members to keep track of their reviews and displaying popular reviews on your site helps motivate contributors.
Vantage also plans on including a “First to Review” reward system to create a competition among contributing members, further motivating the creation of reviews and adding more unique content to your site.
Events
Besides local business listings, an events system is also an important feature to have. Not only does it allow your members to create and advertise their offline events (i.e. car show, bbq, WordPress meetup, etc) it further helps to grow and involve your community.
Each event will have specific details like location, date/time, description, etc. Members can view the event and “Attend” so the event creator knows how many people to expect. This system will use an events custom post type and specific taxonomies to keep it separate from business listings and blog posts.
Now that should give you a much better picture of what to expect from Vantage. We’d also like to list out the high-level features to help answer some of your other questions.
Feature highlights include:
- Monetizing your site by selling business listings
- Build and foster your own user community
- Business reviews and rating system
- Allow your members to create event listings
- Home page & category featured listing system
- Custom post types & taxonomies for business listings
- Custom post types & taxonomies for events
- Save this and favorites bookmarking
- Twitter & Facebook integration
- Customer account area to manage business listing
- Separate blog to promote your directory
- Create your own custom fields and business listing forms
- Search by keyword and/or location
- Interactive Google maps for business listings & events
- Multiple advertising spaces
- Fully widgetized sidebar & footer
- and much more!
Launch Date
We’ve spent the last couple of months on the design and getting the layout just right which has taken longer than we expected. In turn, it has pushed back the development so we just recently got underway. We know how important this theme is to everyone which is why we are doing our best to get it completed asap.
In order to do so, we have pushed back the release date back a few extra weeks to November 5th see our theme release status page for the latest status on Vantage. We know, you of course want it now but a product this advanced takes time to build correctly. 🙂
Here are some screenshots of Vantage:
Our development team is doing their best to get this built quickly. We are always open to your feedback and suggestions but any new feature requests will have to wait for the next release since everything is already locked in for v1.0.
Comments (213)
With this type of site (Vantage) are advertisers expected to pay to be listed? If so, any idea on the price we should charge?
Thanks,
Rick
@Rick, you can provide free listings or charge on a directory by directory basis.
Price really depends. I recommend starting out with free listings to build your site. Then eventually charge for premium space & regular slots.
Really cannot wait for this theme!
Feature Request: Implement promotional video player. For example on the homepage, business customers can feature their videos or show selection of thumbails leading to the business profile that contains videos.
This will be uber awesome!
There’s several plugins out there that could do this job but I want to see what AppThemes is capable of.
Can this theme be used for one category of businesses only in a given city such as “Seattle Electricians”?
Can you “turn off” or inactivate certain elements of the theme such as the “Events” category? It’s unlikely that “Seattle Electricians” would be generating any special events.
Thanks-
Rick
@Rick, you could narrow it down to just one business category but it’s really designed to list multiple.
Yes, the events module can be turned off if it’s not something you’d want to use.
Great concept David! The Events functionality seems like a powerful way to get incoming traffic that converts to business listings – in fact, putting it on the first half instead of second half might make it more dynamic, as would big bold thumbnails.
Also, will business owners be able to showcase videos, not just images of their business? Just some initial thoughts, looks really exciting, congrats!
@City Diaries, yes you will have the option to allow business owners to embed videos on their listing page.
Hi
Can this theme be used for listing the medical/dental practices and Hospitals, diagnostic lab services.
Will this radius search work in Asia/India/Phillipines.
City/state database is customised to US or is it left open for the listing business to add whichever location they operate from.I mean any country, state, city or town from any part of the world.
Regards
@Acumed, yes you will be able to list any sort of business.
Search will work with any city/country since it’s based on long & lat coordinates.
How does this compare with phpMydirectory script. Will the features and functionality be comparable.
Will vantage be able to handle say for eg 30000 listings across 250 towns/cities. If so what kind of hosting environment is required.
Will a regular bluehost kind of hosting do or will it require a more stronger vps or dedicated servers….
@Acumed, Vantage will certainly be scalable since it’s built on top of WordPress. You might need to upgrade to a dedicated server if you plan on launching a large site.
We haven’t really compared phpMydirectory to Vantage. One thing for sure is the ease of installation is much simpler and you don’t need to be technical.
I already have a successful classified site going with Classipress and was thinking about incorporating a business directory and then noticed this post… I love the idea and all the features look great! My question is what would be the easiest way to tie my current site in with the Vantage theme?
@Scott, since you can only run one theme per WordPress instance, you’d have to install another copy of WP.
They could both run on the same server and website, however.
wow.. this looks amazing… I think i can use this as reviews website.
Hey David, Vantage looks great, and perfect timing. I was just starting to think about hacking apart Classi to do the same thing.
STRONGLY SUGGESTED improvement: integrate Paypal IPN Subscriptions payment option rather than making customers pay manually every time a listing expires.
This is great
i’m waiting for this to be released
can’t wait to get this
OMG i can´t wait! I want it now!! ahaha. Will you need testers?
@Luchoa13, possibly. If so, we’ll announce a beta program.
If you need a Dutch translator for this theme , please let me know! un: akoetsier
Looking real good guys!
No pressure, but I really think This one (Vantage theme), because of its nature, is more of a priority than any other theme, as each week (almost) it passes by there are new directories out there. I keep PRAYING that no one will have the same idea in my area as I am (patiently) waiting for this theme.
A new version for Job Roller can wait.
Clipper is nice but Vantage has more market and income potential. quicker and bigger income potential as all businesses need to do this today.
Sage is ok.
I mean, I do not refer to your stuff, but the nature of each.
But of course, this is just me.
Anyway, you guys rock!
But please, put Vantage on top of the pile.
Hello,
How many category levels will allow in vantage ?
Also can we change field names ? such as zip codes etc, because we don’t have zip codes.
Also how many payment gateways integrated ?
@Sarjohn,
Unlimited categories and listings.
fields are completely customizable. It will use the same framework built into ClassiPress.
PayPal for starters.
Also interested in finding out the capabilities in terms of the max amount of listings /max db size and importantly the way the system uploads lists and what types (for example, can it handle 10k plus entries from one csv file?)
Thnx & all the best,
HJ
@Howiej,
it all depends on your server. WordPress and mySQL are very scalable but if you are on a shared server and you have a large site, it will likely run slow.
Thanks for getting back David, can you confirm there is a built in bulk import feature, if so what will it’s maximum capabilities be in terms of file size uploads?
If not then they why not?
All the best
HJ
I am very excited to see this released, as I was hoping for a quality alternative to another directory package that costs alot more and is built on a custom phpcake framework. This will be really nice, and fit my business model nicely.
Will admin be answering some of the questions that have been left over the past several days? I have left a few questions myself.
Thanks,
Rick
Can you please incorporate a map which contains all of the companies listed under a specific category. Yes, you do have the search facility but it would be really cool if you could click a category and see a map which had all the companies listed under a specific category.
@James Plough,
Good suggestion. It won’t be in v1.0 but we will consider it for a later version.
Yes please check this theme, it has a big map on the main page, this is really cool.
Could you add something like this when people hit a search of a specific area like sushi in new york, it will show a map of new york with all sushi bars?
Also i showed both themes to some internet users and they all choose the theme from this other site because of the big map.
But this theme doesn’t support multiple cities, thats why im eager to test Vantage!
Great theme.
It would be useful to have an easy to access horizontal menu for the main categories though.
bump!
What I meant was to see all the main categories at once on the homepage.
On the screenshot preview, it looks like categories are only accessible with the dropdown menu on the right of the menu.
Hi..
Is it going to be possible to have only specific users creating events in certain areas?
Also, will members be able to connect using their Facebook login without the need of an external plugin?
Thanks
Tom
i agree that it definitely needs this functionality . Twitter as well.
@Baxter, yes it will have Twitter integration.
@Tom Gibbons,
Initially Vantage will be setup to allow any user to post an event. We could eventually add a user-level system like you mentioned if it’s a popular feature request.
We are adding Facebook login to our other theme ClassiPress now so it’s likely we’ll do the same with Vantage.
David,
Are the main listings on the site usually free for local businesses? I know you mentined there will be an option to pay for a sponsored business.
Does it make sense and is it possible to use a directory for one business category only? For example, A directory just for “Denver Electricians”. It seems this would allow a person to more easily capture traffic driven by “exact search” specific keywords.
Thanks-
Rick W.
Rick W.
@Rick,
You can set it up however you like. Charge for listings for certain categories or make them free. Very similar to ClassiPress.
I just answered your other question above. 🙂
I’m planning to use vantage in a small city scale of around 10,000 people, I’m wondering what particular type of hosting would would be perfect for a smooth performance.
PS. please free to recommend a particular web hosting compant
Maybe a bit overdone but as we talk about businesses , it might be a nice idea that they can ad jobapplications?
Or just a button which points to the jobapplications at there own site. Something like a simple “Were Hiring” button in the upperright corner?
Excuse my english if written incorrectly 🙂
Hi David
In what areas of this theme will widgets be able to be used?
@Phil, there will be multiple sidebars which will all be widgetized. The footer as well. Same features as ClassiPress. 🙂
ive been dealing in b2b with small businesses for 10 years now. we get a lot of requests for a business directory. glad to see we will be able to fufill that need with your product.
so could you release it already? 🙂
@Jeff, wish we could just wave our magic wand and have it done. 😉
A quality product takes time to build, however.
Do you think you can focus on this rather than the other smaller less “popular” unreleased themes? People are holding off on buying Classipress because of this one theme, that alone should tell you this theme should be your focus and should be released with priority.
@Natestronn, all of our themes are equally important.
We are sticking to our product release schedule and doing our best to get Vantage built.
Hey, if you need a spanish translator, please, send me a mail. Good job.
Discussion is closed.