Launching an Online Marketplace Directory: The Theme Is Just the Beginning

June 1, 2021

At Inspect.com, we chose Listable from Pixelgrade as the perfect theme to launch an online marketplace directory. We took the existing theme and customized features to offer listings and search users an easy and elegant way to work with the marketplace.

Home inspectors may learn ways to improve and optimize their own websites by following the steps we took to create our marketplace directory.

Know What You Want from Your Theme

Before you choose a theme, know what you want. We knew Listable was the choice for Inspect.com as soon as we saw the features.

We had two goals for the website. We wanted to support the professional home inspection community. And we were committed to raising awareness for the inspection community by helping buyers and sellers find qualified inspectors to serve them with unbiased, objective inspections to facilitate real estate transactions.

Before we started looking for a theme, we outlined the criteria of expectations we had for a useable theme. Because we would serve two audiences—inspectors and homebuyers and sellers—functionality for both audiences was a priority.

Our priority criteria requirements were as follows:

  • Visual appeal
  • Easy navigation on both desktop and mobile devices
  • Straightforward steps to add information for listings
  • Data collection and management
  • Client and user education
  • Professional feel for end users
  • Easy to understand search features for end users
  • Ability for users to get immediate results

Plan for the Future

Planning for the future is actualizing your business vision. To make your business vision a reality, you must know how you will function. For a website, especially a marketplace website, you need to know your audience, what they need and how your business will be the answer to those needs.

Choosing a theme to match your business vision requires having an idea of how your business operates and who you serve. To create your marketplace website, you should have a sense of how the information will flow, what aspects of the theme you will use and how you will customize the theme to reflect your business.

When Inspect.com started using Listable, we had a simple vision, but by working with the features of the theme, we discovered how we could meet and exceed our vision’s goals and serve all of our clients—businesses (by offering listings) and users (by providing a way to find qualified inspectors).

Behind the Scenes with Technology

Once you choose your theme, you’ll need a place to host your domain and hosting service. Because you might need to serve a wide audience—those who create a listing and those who are your end users of those listings—you should choose hosting that meets your data needs.

Create a sound foundation for your theme by securing the best technical support to make your website run smoothly.

You need fast, reliable hosting to immediately test your site for performance. People need immediate access to your website. The reality is, if your load speed is slow, people leave. They will never experience your dynamic service. Good hosting is key to successful delivery to your audience.

A dedicated server provides essential benefits, like power and control, for marketplace websites. Unlike shared hosting, “dedicated” means your business will not share with any other business. The hosting provider gives you exclusive use of the resource with the central processing unit (CPU), random-access memory (RAM) and disk space you need. The hosting provider builds and maintains the server, eliminating the upfront business cost of purchasing your own.

You want security for your business, your listing partners and your customers. A dedicated server ensures they keep your data private.

As you build your website, immediately benchmark test the website for speed. Use that as a baseline for comparison as you build out your platform, to immediately and continuously isolate and resolve performance issues.

As you test, target for less than 1-second load speed on the listing page and a half-second for loading a blog page, frequently asked questions (FAQs) and other pages. It’s important to deliver results almost immediately to customers on marketplace websites.

Customize Your Theme

Once you have your theme and website, it’s time to tailor the theme to your business for your audience. Listable already creates visual appeal, but behind the scenes, you want to customize the theme to represent your business branding, meet the service needs of your listings and help users find exactly what they need.

With Listable, you can change colors and fonts while retaining the logic and consistency of the theme. No matter where a user lands on the website, Listable looks consistent so your user will experience the feel of your business brand.

Categories, Types and Tags

When you create categories for your directory, your goal is to match the search intent of the user with relevant listing features. If you are creating a directory, you want the site visitors to use the directory to connect with the listings.

Each listing will attach to a category or categories that relate to the site visitor’s needs. You need to create categories that match the reason a visitor will use your site. For example, the categories for Inspect.com’s site are as follows:

  • Home
  • Termite
  • Roof
  • Commercial
  • Environmental

While you want categories to be comprehensive, make sure they are the prime search requirements for your users. Use Types to help site users drill down.

For Inspect.com, we wanted our users to discover the most relevant services that are located close to where they live. So, we created detailed Types of services for each Category, divided the inspectors into Regions and utilized the Google Maps application program interface (API) integration in the Listable theme.

We determined alternate common words and phrases for each Category and created Types lists to deliver results when users search for them. For example, some Types for the Category Home Inspection are Home Inspector, Property Inspector, Property Inspection and Building Inspector.

Regions provide the opportunity to segment your listings by location. Our approach was to break down the country into individual states, then further break down each region into individual counties on an as needed basis. As the number of listings grows, it becomes important to manage Regions to keep lists from becoming too long.

Integrating a verified Google account using the Google Maps API with the Listable theme allows your website to automatically deliver geolocation services to people using your services.

Tags are dynamic and can be added to listings, posts and other website components to help assemble different articles into an intelligent collection of related material.

Pixelgrade provides a variety of icons. To customize our specialized directory, we hired a graphic designer to create icons for our categories and geolocated regions.

WordPress Management Tools

A directory site requires you to manage data. You will want to create clients, keep track of their information and communicate with them. Adding WordPress plugins allows you to manage and track data for your business. We added two sets of plugins. First, we added plugins critical to how we use the theme and, second, plugins that assisted in website management.

Our theme uses plugins related to connecting with inspectors with listings. The Region plugin allows for creating Regions to geolocate inspectors, the import plugin allows you to automatically create new listings from form submissions, the job manager field plugin allows for adding email and other additional listing info, and Yoast duplicate post is used to clone new listing/post(s) from existing ones.

  1. Regions for WP Job Manager: Use Regions in listings
  2. WP All Import: Create listings from form data
  3. WP All Import—Listable Add-On: Supports import into Listable
  4. WP Job Manager Field Editor: Add/Remove/Modify listing fields
  5. Yoast Duplicate Post: Easily clone listings and posts

We considered the above plugins essential to tailor the theme for our business. The second set of plugins performs three functions: enhances security for our business and our users, facilitates communication among listings to create community and ensures reliable email communication directly from the website.

  1. Really Simple SSL: Easily add SSL to your site
  2. Wordfence Security: Add security to your website
  3. WP Mail SMTP: Reliable website mail service
  4. WP Foro: Add a forum to your website

Since its inception, Inspect.com has neither removed any of these plugins nor added new ones. Careful, strategic planning is the reason. We planned from the outset for a lean, clean-running website that is easy to navigate. Overuse of plugins can slow site load speed and you want the site to load quickly. And, plugins can cause compatibility issues with other plugins.

Unleashing User’s Potential

Listable contains the ability to allow listings to be modified by their owners, including a login feature using the standard WordPress user feature. We currently create listings internally to ensure a common look and feel across all listings, but plan on allowing users to make changes to their listings as a future feature upgrade.

Marketplace Directory Vision

In less than two years, Inspect.com’s directory has gone from vision planning to an active, functional website. We believe strategic planning is the core value of our success so far.

We are still building our listings and we do that organically. What we have is a place that makes our listings appealing. The visual quality and details simplify searching for users. Equally important is prospective inspectors considering a listing to see how their business will display professionally.

Matching the long-term vision of Inspect.com with a theme to actualize our goal made Listable the choice. With the variety of features and customization to meet our vision, Listable stood out. Now that we have implemented it, we know we made the right choice to grow our marketplace. You can check out the results or find your perfect inspector at Inspect.com.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of ASHI. The information contained in the article is general and readers should always independently verify for accuracy, completeness and reliability.


To Read the Full Article

ASHI offers its members unparalleled resources to advance their careers. ASHI offers training for inspectors at all levels of knowledge and experience, including resources about all major home systems. Members benefit from a vast network of experienced professionals, providing a community for mentorship and knowledge sharing..

Learn More About Membership »

In this Issue

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Professional Networking

Grow your professional network, find a mentor, network with the best, and best part of the community that’s making home inspection better every day.