Running a classified ads website gives you new perspectives! Before you start building an advertisement website, it is worth looking at it from the perspective of the customer. What will your target customer group be like? Who do you want to attract to your website? What kind of ads would you like to dominate in the content of the site?
The key is to answer these questions and build/configure a website to provide visitors and future users simple tools and an easy way to add and manage their accounts and ads. The more conveniently, the more new customers and the popularity you will get.
You can find some tools for WordPress, that can make the process of setting up your classifieds website much easier and faster. All you need is an appropriate strategy that will give you valuable opportunities. Discover the powerful features of TerraClassifieds plugin.
TerraClassifieds is a free classifieds WordPress plugin, purposed for creating a classified ads website.
The installation process is the same as for any WordPress plugin. TerraClassifieds works with both a new or already existing website. All options are quite simple.
TerraClassifieds Features
TerraClassifieds plugin includes features required for creating a classifieds website. Let’s focus on them now.
Built-In Widgets for TerraClassifieds
An Account Menu: Displays account menu where logged user can manage his adverts, add a new advert, control his profiles, see the list of favorite ads. This widget is required for every modern classified ads website.
Search Form: It displays the search input but also can show the fields with categories and locations and filtrable ads types (which is a handy feature). Searched ads can be filtered through types like: “urgent,” “new,” “bestseller,” “for free,” etc. You can enter restrictions for the category list. Locations can be filtered using the field type (selector/input).
Classifieds Categories: It displays categories in the vertical or horizontal view. Display the vertical layout using a different number of columns. There are also other settings that you can use. It’s the depth of the sub-category, the list of ads in a given category, or empty categories.
The appropriate category structure, with high categories and sub-categories, makes it much easier to navigate and filter results. It is worth taking care of the excellent structure of the categories on the website because it also affects the better results of the site in search engines.
Below you can see the example categories structure used on TerraClassic theme demo:
If you are wondering what the best way to choose your category names is, check the most popular advertising categories for classified ads portal recommended by one of the web development company – the author of the other popular classifieds script.
Latest Ads: It displays latest ads submitted at the classifieds website. You can configure the widget setting the number of displayed ads, limit the description, choose the thumbnail size, show price, and more.
TerraClassifieds Pages
Frontend Ad Submission: TerraClassifieds gives you access to simple ad submission from the frontend. Customers must log in to add an ad. The submission form includes all fields required for a modern advert presentation. The most important are “ad type”, “selling type”, location and gallery.
Take a look at how easy customers may add ads on classifieds website built with TerraClassifieds – free classifieds plugin for WordPress.
Before adding the advert it’s worth to follow tips on how to write a good offer, it may help you a lot if you are a beginner in a classifieds business.
Edit Ad: Submitted adverts and reviewed by the administrator can be edited and modified. Users can edit all the fields from the title, through the description, category, type, price, images to ad location.
User Registration: A simple registration form where the user needs to enter the username, email address, and check necessary checkboxes. The generated password will be sent via email.
Registration page view can be chosen from two following options: Generate automatically a password or select a password during the registration.
Edit User Profile: After the simple registering process, the user may edit his profile and change or fill in additional fields like first and last name, phone, avatar, short description, or website URL.
User profile can contain additional user fields which can be added in the website’s backend.
My Submissions: It’s a list of all users adverts in a table-like layout. The customer may check his adverts info like expiration date, the advert status and action buttons like remove, edit, archive and renew for an expired advert.
Login & Forgot a Password: The simple login form. Forgot password page would restore your password using your username or email address.
Favorite Ads: Once favorite adverts option enabled the user may mark items as his favorite and display them in his profile.
TerraClassifieds Views
Category View: The plugin displays listings from the selected category with image, title, description, ads type, and price. These are only examples. There is much more.
See the category view from TerraClassic theme demo site. The Electronics & Appliances category is displayed here. Each advert comes with elements mentioned above (description, image, title, ad type, and price) but there is also a location, the author and date included.
Advert Page: It displays the ad image with the title and full description and additional photos. Additionally, you can see the date of the ad submission, price, contact form, advertiser details, avatar (with linked name) and “report abuse” form.
Author View: Users can click on the advertiser name and check all submitted ads by this advertiser. The view can include detailed information about the author as well. You can display the author’s photo along with details like a link to his website and phone number.
See the example used in TerraClassific theme demo site.
There Are Also Useful Settings For:
- Category view
- Advert view
- Adding advert
- Locations
- Types
- Image processing
- Style
- Security
- Email templates
- SEO
- Status and documentation
As you can see, the TerraClassifieds plugin offers a set of features that is entirely sufficient for a professional advertising portal.
Ads Types
Types are a very powerful setting here. Using them gives users the possibility to add the additional badge to an add which makes it more visible. For example, you can set types like urgent, for free, new, bestseller and many others. To make the types even more useful, you can make them filterable, so users searching for ads can search for a specific type only.
How to use Ads Types? Check this tutorial – How to use Ads Types?
Locations
You may define and manage locations in your classifieds website. It is recommended to have appropriate locations for grouping ads and making navigation easy.
Thanks to the locations feature, you can add new locations. You can set the name, slug (optional), and parent location of the nested structure of locations. Locations can be displayed on advert view, category view, and adding advert view. That is not all. They can also be displayed in a search widget (as it was mentioned earlier).
It means that users looking for ads can search them using location as well.
Take a look at how easy customers may add locations on classifieds website built with TerraClassifieds – free classifieds plugin for WordPress.
Email Templates
An email template is a pre-written email that you can use to replace with your content. They are used for administrator notifications. All notifications come to the main admin e-mail set in the global settings.
You can also set the reply-to email address. The address will be used for all user notification emails related to TerraClassifieds during registration, new advert adding, changed status, and ad expiration.
This address will be used in the contact form – user notification is communication between an ad author and a customer (uses customer e-mail for “reply-to”.)
TerraClassic Free WordPress Theme With TerraClassifieds Adjusted
TerraClassic is created for classified ads websites, and it provides you with pure, straight-forward user experience. This is a free classifieds theme for WordPress, based on theTerraclassifieds engine, having a ready design adapted to the classifieds solutions.
With this simple, free classifieds theme, you can create a modern classified ads website allowing users to add ads easily.
You can quickly install a copy of the theme’s demo, that is available for free. The demo site is already configured. So each user has access to a functional advertising portal from the start.
The demo site offers a bunch of useful features like blog, pricing tables, galleries (Animated gallery, Gallery grid modal, Video gallery), faq section or coming soon page.
You can download the TerraClassifieds free classifieds plugin and TerraClassic WordPress theme separately.
It’s Your Turn Now!
It’s just an overview of the essential features and capabilities of TerraClassifieds plugin for WordPress. Don’t miss checking the extensive TerraClassifieds documentation, where you can find information on how to adapt the plugin to your needs. There are two ways to adjust the plugin. You can do it from scratch, or take a shorter route using the WordPress classified ads theme.
If you have other preferences related to the design or theme’s layout, you can customize it the way you want, changing colors, and other elements.
Download the TerraClassifieds plugin for free and use it together with the TerraClassic template to create a functional site with ads. If you are wondering if it’s worth to build a website with free classifieds ads read this short article to check how you may make money posting free ads.
