Every Site Needs Product Listings

As I mentioned in my last article about rebuilding the dream kitchen spaces site, this website used to be driven by a datafeed and was populated with hundreds of categories and items.  In order to make a more useful and relevant site, we have chosen to cut the offerings way down and concentrate on giving you information instead of just pummeling you with listings.

Even with a limited exclusive offering there is a need for product listings.  We decided that we wanted to only add a few listings to any content page so that you didn't feel bombarded with offers while trying to research a company or appliance category.  The other reason for this is that Google likes sites that have a higher ratio of content to offers.

We Choose PHPBay Pro WordPress Plugin

For this reason, we chose to use a WordPress plugin called PHPBay Pro to add listings to our content areas.  With this plugin we can control the number and type of listings we include in our pages and posts on this site.  We can search for keywords and home in on the listings we're looking for using a minimum and maximum price threshold.  Basically, it allows us to make sure the listings are relevant to the content topic.  That way, you can click on a listing to learn more about it without having to trip over pages of listings while you're on our blog.

The only time things have gotten a little tricky is when we've tried to add listings based on multiple criteria like "bosch" and "built-in coffee" but we think this is a user problem and I'm going to contact the developer to see what we're doing wrong.

We will definitely report back on our progress.  In the mean time, check out our new buying guide page, Built In Coffee Makers and check out how we've added listings to it.