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Our Rating
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City Guide is a WordPress theme from WooThemes, and is built to really highlight attractions, restaurants and businesses for a local city. This would not really be the correct directory theme for a niche directory site, or for multiple cities – as the Google Maps integration works best when you are focusing at a hyperlocal level on an individual city. Utilizing this theme, you have the ability to use WordPress as a directory script – which is pretty sweet!
Included are (6) different color styles, and of course you can customize further by editing the CSS files. It’s WordPress, so installation is just as simple as installing any other theme. Let’s take a look at our main rating categories…
Features
Integration with Google Maps is by far the strongest feature of this directory theme, and it’s very nicely done. For a hyperlocal city directory, this is perfect. We really like the category maps, so you can have a maps of restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc. The integrated Get Directions is also a great feature. We also really like the geo-tagging features.
City Guide has a custom home page module that can be used as an about or welcome section. Widgets are available for twitter posts, flickr photos – all the widget possibilities you can think of for WordPress, they’re all available. The layout is at the high quality we’ve come to expect from WooThemes.
Are there any missing features? Well, we think so – but it really depends on what you are using the theme for. Here’s a few features that we believe are lacking for a website directory theme:
- No zipcode or proximity search
- Just one address field – no phone or other fields. You’d have to do this as custom fields and edit the template.
- No way for business owners to submit their own listings. The Contribute button is just an email form.
- No built in Social Networking integration (Tweet This, Facebook Likes, etc.) You would need to add this.
Ease of Installation
City Guide is a WordPress theme, so it already has a leg up when it comes to easy installation. Just upload the theme and activate it. The theme control panel makes the initial configuration easy and fast.
We’ve not yet found any strange plugin conflicts or problems using the theme. It just simply works, and does what it’s meant to do.
Ease of Customization
Lots of possibility with plugins and widgets, just like any WordPress site. The template CSS is well laid out, and if you aren’t shy with your coding skills – this theme is easy to modify and make your own.
Monetization Potential
City Guide disappointed us here just a bit, as we really wanted to see the ability to charge for featured listings as you would get with other directory scripts. There are ways you could work around this, but it would take some work and additional plugins – and wouldn’t be as clean and automated as some of the other directory programs.
You do have the ability for banner and text advertising of course, and you can easily integrate OIO Publisher for selling and managing your ad space. Other options would be to sell reviews to your local business owners – but of course that’s outside the software platform.
SEO Optimization
With all the options WordPress offers us for SEO optimization, you have a solid head start here. A good permalink structure, and some work on meta data with a SEO plugin, and you’ll be in a solid place for search engine friendliness.
City Guide doesn’t get the coveted 5-star rating, because they missed an opportunity to utilize Rich Snippets (microdata, microformats, RDFa). We’re seeing more and more search engine results displaying this microdata, and Businesses and Organizations should really be marked up with this structured syntax.
Could the theme be customized to add this – of course, but it really should have been there out-of-the-box.
Conclusion
WordPress offers such a wide range of possibilities, and having a directory theme on this platform makes so much sense. City Guide is a really solid offering, and if you have a super focused city site – this may be just what you are looking for.
City Guide directory theme from WooThemes
Price: $70
