Red Kite Creative

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Weekly Links Roundup – Store Locator Plugins, Plugin Roundup, Social Media, Screenshots Tool

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

If you have multiple brick-and-mortar locations, a really useful feature you can add to your WordPress site is a store locator – a map showing pins for each of your locations. Clicking on a pin opens up address and other info about that location. Here’s a small roundup of 5 top store locator plugins. I’ve used Store Locator on a few sites, pretty easy to use, but these other plugins also look promising.

And speaking of WordPress plugins, here’s a big review of the single best plugin across many categories. While I agree with many of the selected winners, the one I differ with is the best forms plugin. IMO it’s Gravity Forms, and has been for years. Gravity Forms is a commercial plugin currently priced at $59/yr for one site.

If you’re evaluating your social media strategy – or just jumping in with social media for your business – this post on choosing the right social media platform for your business might help. You can’t do everything; this post and infographic can help you decide how to spend your time efficiently. Reviews Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.

Finally… here’s a neat tool I was introduced to in a tech support chat this week. Snaggy is a great free tool for creating and sharing screenshots, perfect for chat.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Adding Simple User Reviews to Your WordPress Website

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Need to add some very simple reviews to your website – like reviews for a service or product, or even testimonials – but are not using a shopping cart that will make it easy for you? You can create a form for visitors to add reviews or testimonials and display them throughout your site – no coding required!

This tutorial uses no coding – just the popular Gravity Forms plugin (a commercial one, but the best forms plugin you can buy IMO) and a custom post type plugin.

I’ll walk you through the process step by step, showing you how to create a custom post type, create and add your reviews form, then display the new reviews in a widget on your site.

This article was originally published in Tuts+ so head over there to read the rest.

CSU Environmental Learning Center

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The Colorado State University Environmental Learning Center came to Red Kite looking for help with a few things:

  • A website that was standalone, not lost amid the larger site run by Warner College;
  • A way to accept online payment for registration and membership without going off-site;
  • A site where they could have their own unique look and feel (again, different than the department);
  • A way to have a large number of forms more easily managed;
  • A place where staff could view staff-only info;
  • And most importantly, a site they could edit and add to themselves.

CSU ELC screenshotWe obliged. The new ELC website has all of these features and more, including two calendars (one public and one for internal use), a blog, and a few photo galleries from various programs.

We used WordPress, our content management system (CMS) of choice, to handle the backend. The ELC has a number of editors that have access to different parts of the site (this access is managed in WordPress, too).

We recreated a number of forms, some of which were available on the old site only as PDF downloads. We used the venerable Gravity Forms plugin to make great-looking forms with extra features like conditional sections that display only when certain criteria are met.

One very important feature was ecommerce. The ELC worked with CSU to get an Authorize.Net account for their organization. We incorporated Authorize.Net’s provided payment form into the site, and connected it to our Membership and Program Registration forms to give a pain-free online purchase experience to those who chose to use it.

The ELC was very happy with our work and is making the most of their new site, blogging and adding in new programs as they are needed. We were happy to help!