Dating software, job board software, classified ads software
From the category archives:
Want more traffic to your web site? Syndicating your ads to Oodle can help. In webClassifieds 2.1 it is now possible to send all your ads to be listed in Oodle’s search engine. Oodle is a classified ad aggregator search engine that drives huge amounts of traffic to web properties everywhere. Now, you can get your ads dynamically listed with them effortlessly.
Many customers have been looking for a way to allow easy access to their site using mobile devices. We’re happy to announce that we’ve developed an incredible plugin optimized just for iPhone mobile viewing.
This is a great addition since so many people view websites on the go. With this plugin, you can give your members the ability to browse the site with ease.
For more information, please visit the plugin page. The plugin is available for purchase for $99, and is included free of charge with webClassifieds Pro.
In webClassifieds 2.1 we’re introducing several new themes for specific industries. The first one is for auto classifieds. Not only is this a great looking new theme, but we have paired it with categories and search boxes relevant to the auto industry! Here’s what it looks like:
As you can see, we’ve added two separate search boxes for new/used cars. The categories users can search from are also all relevant to this industry. In other words, you can have an auto classifieds site out of the box with this great new theme!
Many customers have been looking for a way to make certain categories within the site free for users to post in. Craigslist is a great example of why you may want to do this. Users are more than willing to pay for categories, such as jobs or real estate. However, other categories, such as book or clothing, people would be less willing to pay for.
In webClassifieds 2.1, you can now make any category you wish free. This gives you the flexibility to attract customers to free categories, who will eventually end up buying ads in your paid categories. We hope you life this new feature!
When you first start a classifieds site you might not have enough ads to make your visitors excited. That’s no longer a problem in webClassifieds v2.1 with backfilling from Oodle. Once enabled, your classifieds site will be supplemented with ads from Oodle.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say someone searches for a “camera” and no one has posted an ad for a camera yet. Before, your visitor would see an error saying there are no matches. Not anymore. webClassifieds will query the Oodle API and get matches for that search query and display them in the search results. It looks like your site has thousands of ads and increases abandonment!
What does this look like? As you can see from the screenshot below, it looks just like the rest of your search results:
We’re thrilled to announce our major release of webClassifieds! We’ve listened to our customers requests in building out this great new feature set, and we’re sure you’ll love it.
You have noticed our blog posts through the development process, but here is a quick summary of the incredible new features that will help your classifieds site really take off:
So if you’ve been waiting for the new version to purchase, you can buy now and receive our great new release. And if you’re an existing customer, we’re offering this update to everyone free of charge even if your update plan has expired, so upgrade today!
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The ever growing popularity of social media sites has opened new ways for web site owners to promote traffic and drive new visitors to their site. With Facebook being by far the most popular, we thought it would be great to allow you to use it to build your site even further by allowing members to login through their Facebook account and show ads they post on their wall.
The new version of webClassifieds allows you to do just that, by integrating with Facebook Connect.
This integration has two major features. First, Facebook Connect will allow your members to login and automatically create their account using their Facebook login information. This cuts down on registration times, and will reduce abandonment rates for visitors who don’t want to fill out yet another registration form. All they’ll have to do is simply click the Facebook Connect button, authorize Facebook to connect to your site, and that’s it!
The second major feature, which we’re really excited about, is the ability to integrate with each person’s Facebook wall or activity feed. Whenever an ad is posted on your site, a copy of the ad will be posted to that persons wall so that all of their friends can see that they’re selling an item! This is a fantastic way to build your brand recognition, and make your site go viral. If one person with 100 friends posts an ad, 100 people automatically see it and your site. That means they learn of your site’s existence, and are that much more likely to register next time they have to buy or sell something.
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When searching for items, people want to know exactly where they will need to travel and how far. Sometimes, a listing will be in an obscure and unfamiliar city to others. That’s where adding a map of the item location comes in very handy. The new version of our classified ads software features an integration with Google Maps by showing the item location right on the map. Your members will be able to easily zoom in and out, and get directions and travel times for each listing.
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The new version of webClassifieds offers a totally revamped system to make sure you get listed in the search engines, and listed high! Here’s what we’ve added:
The older version had URLs in a format such as: http://yoursite.com/index.php?page=search. Many search engines, such as Google see index.php, and think there’s only one page, when there could be thousands like this throughout your site. The new version makes sure that Google crawls all your pages by formatting URLs in a manner such as: http://yoursite.com/search. Furthermore, we’ve optimized URLs even further for ads to make sure all your ads are found, and displayed prominently in the search results. Ads are formatted in the following way: http://yoursite.com/ad/0001-Selling-My-Widget. By putting the title of the ad in the URL, this heavily impacts each of your ads’ rankings in the search engines.
In the old system, we had a static title for each page, such as YourSite. This meant that Google thought that many of the pages were similar or the same, and only included one page in the search results. Now, each page has its own unique title, such as Search | YourSite.com. We also made custom titles for ads so they look like this: Selling My Widget – Albany, New York, United States | YourSite. So if someone is looking to buy a widget in Albany, NY, your site now has optimized for that search term through the URL and the site title, two of the most important factors search engines take into account!
META tags consist of keywords and descriptions. META keywords are generated so that your site targets the keywords you’d like to rank on most. META descriptions are dynamically generated for each page, so that each page has it’s own custom description. Ads have a short description as their META description. What does this mean? When someone finds your site on Google, the description below the site title in the search results is the META description. Without it, Google guesses a description and it is often wrong and makes your result look bad.
We didn’t stop there. Finally, we’ve added an entire sitemap readable by all major search engines. Without a sitemap, search engines slowly crawl your site page-by-page, and can often miss crucial pages to index. A sitemap fixes this problem by telling the search engine every single page that is present on your site. This means your site gets crawled faster and that every page will count!
We’re thrilled about these awesome new features, and what they’ll do for your traffic. I hope you are too!
There are several areas of webClassifieds that needed to be revamped for easier use. Instead of reloading pages for simple forms, we’ve consolidated many into dynamic windows that pop up on the users screen (similar to Facebook).
Here’s an example: before, users had to go to a new page to send a new mail message although it was just a simple form. Now the process looks like this:
When a user click the “Send New Message” button, a form like this pops up:
Not only does this look great, it’s functional too. Fewer page reloads lets users get things done faster and provides a better user experience.
webClassifieds 2.0 is slated to be released by the end of Q1 2011.
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