Working business model of a successful small city portal created on CMS WordPress
Even the smallest cities in Russia have their own portals with local news, a poster, a business directory, a forum, and a bulletin board.
I own one of these portals. Its name is HAYK Obninsk (Obninsk, Kaluga region, population - 105,200 people).
I started developing it in 2010, on CMS WordPress. The main idea is to make something special, bright, necessary for the residents of the city every day.
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After three and a half years I decided to write about this post. As a result, the project turned out to be very good and quite unique (many of the ideas implemented were not seen on any other city portals, although I constantly watch them).
The first step is to install the CMS. It so happened that my portal is not on one WordPress, but on two at once. One for the news feed and the other for everything else. This is done for convenience, since news requires a special structure that is not suitable for content from other sections.
One engine is in the root folder, the other is in the new folder.
Many are accustomed to the fact that the site on WordPress looks like a feed of articles with comments.
Therefore, the appearance of the main page ( http://iobninsk.ru/ ) usually causes surprise and the question - “Is this exactly WordPress?”.
At the moment, the main engine has 1915 articles and only one page (and that is empty and without a title).
In the settings of the engine, you can choose what is displayed on the main page - the latest entries, or a static page. I chose the latter. Since she is only one, I left her empty. And instead of managing its content through the WordPress editor, I edit the page.php file in the theme folder. This gives much more flexibility. In addition, the content on the main page changes very rarely.
In order for the site header to be uniform for both the main site and the news feed, I brought almost all the content of the caps to PHP-inclode, which is loaded into both engines from one place.
Now about the navigation. All content is available on the links from the drop-down menu. Billet menu took from here . Then, with a file, I adjusted it for a very long time in the direction of lightness, airiness and minimalism.
The most requested (vacation spots, shopping centers, sights, famous residents, main streets) led to the main page in the form of small blocks with text and pictures on lightboxes. It would be possible to bring the largest page to the main page, but the priority was given to those subsections, which, through the drop-down menu, were a long and dreary search.
Registration on the site is closed, regular comments are disabled (even the forms for them have been deleted). Instead, a comment widget from VKontakte, which is enough for the eyes.
The big bet is made on internal optimization and relink. In this regard, the portal is a lot like Wikipedia. There are almost no isolated articles left. Everything is interconnected. Including news feed. If certain persons, companies, events are mentioned in the news, there is almost always a link to the relevant article. I draw attention, not to the category and not to the tag (as on many other sites), namely, a direct link to the article.
CNC applied (nice URL). Without any categories and nesting. That is: site.ru/pagename
All graphics are not uploaded through the WordPress interface, but via FTP. And the name of the files corresponds to the URL of the page.
The standard photo size is 950x632 pixels. That is, the photo goes almost the entire width of the site (980 pixels).
Moreover, each photo is covered with a text copyright indicating the month and year of the shooting, which is very useful.
The portal is heavily used lightboxes. And for thumbnails and for photos that open when you click on a thumbnail, there is a uniform size everywhere - 150x100 and 640x426 pixels, respectively. The copyright is not applied to such photos.
Features of the content, atypical:
1. Section of attractions. In which everything interesting is collected that is in the city (with photos). All objects are marked on Yandex.Map, for each object there is a separate article with a brief text description.
If, for example, a monument to a famous person acts as a landmark, then the article will have an internal link to the material about this person.
2. Section about famous residents of the city. There are both figures of the present and figures of the past. Significance is determined by, among other things, the frequency of mentioning in the news. If a certain name has slipped more than 2-3 times in the news feed, then you need to make an article about a person, and link all references to this article.
3. Section about the streets. A separate page has been created for each street in the city. There is general information, photos of different years.
When an address is mentioned in the business directory (and not only in it), the street name is always an internal link.
In the near future, I will implement the second part of the plan - the listing in one form or another on the street page of all that is located on it. So that a person could search for a certain company not by name or by sphere of activity, but by the place in which it is located.
4. Regional orientation. Often, people are interested in not only what is now, but also what was before.
Suppose there was a certain shop three years ago. It has been added to the directory. Then he went broke. It will not be removed from the catalog, it will simply be transferred to the category of those that previously existed.
I ride a bike a lot in the city, I walk. Almost always with a camera. Therefore, I often take photos of facades of buildings, streets, signs, billboards and stretch marks. And I spread all this on the appropriate pages. This leads to the rapid growth of the content base. By the same time, the city is changing. And on these photos, standing nearby, you can track all these changes.
These photos are very interesting. In addition, I often drag them. As with my permission, and without it. This is especially true of journalists and editors of other urban resources. At the moments when they are writing an article about something, I want to illustrate it with a picture of the topic, and here it is just at hand.
5. Great attention is paid to literacy and text formatting. Long dashes, quotes, Christmas trees, paragraphs, bold. ALT-parameter and Title must be written to all pictures.
6. In the business directory there is no navigation bread crumbs. Instead, at the bottom of the page in a special gray mini-dice all the categories to which it belongs are listed.
7. Work is underway with a variety of archives. Newspapers of the city, private individuals, creative associations agreed to provide free of charge a huge amount of unique content (text and historical photos) for exclusive placement on the portal.
Business:
Here atypicalities even more. Since there is no portal:
- Contextual advertising (Yandex.Direct, Google Adsense and their ilk).
- Refs like SAPE (with TIC 50, PR 4, DMOZ).
- Affiliate buttons and teasers.
- Systems for dynamic sale of banner impressions.
- No flashing and flashing ads.
To work with the portal, the status of an individual entrepreneur was received, paying 6% of gross fees in taxes.
Work is conducted only with local advertisers under direct contracts, bypassing any intermediaries.
For sale banner with a size of 550x300 pixels under the title. And this is the only banner place.
A static image is used as a banner (JPG, or GIF without animation). And for this, a rotator is used (a simple PHP script written at my request many years ago). Due to this, any banner can appear on any page (or you just need to click on the page refresh button).
A link from a banner can lead either to an external website or to a company’s page in the portal’s business directory (if it does not have a website of its own).
But this is not the main source of income. Basis - premium placement in the business directory.
Here it is necessary to highlight this moment. All companies that are in the city are added to the catalog (no actions are required from them for this). They are provided with free basic accommodation in the core section. What does it mean: a separate page, one photo, a link to a corporate website, contact details.
After that (when Yandex ate the page and it took a worthy place in the search results) the company is offered to switch to premium.
Subsections decorated in the form of dies. By default, the plate is gray. Sorting alphabetically.
If the company starts paying money, the color of its plate changes to gold. Moreover, the module itself rises above all others and becomes wider. Additional photos are added to it + some paragraphs of the promotional text.
If there are several premium partners in one subcategory, then their modules are also ordered alphabetically among themselves.
Such is the business model.
If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them.
I own one of these portals. Its name is HAYK Obninsk (Obninsk, Kaluga region, population - 105,200 people).
I started developing it in 2010, on CMS WordPress. The main idea is to make something special, bright, necessary for the residents of the city every day.
')
After three and a half years I decided to write about this post. As a result, the project turned out to be very good and quite unique (many of the ideas implemented were not seen on any other city portals, although I constantly watch them).
The first step is to install the CMS. It so happened that my portal is not on one WordPress, but on two at once. One for the news feed and the other for everything else. This is done for convenience, since news requires a special structure that is not suitable for content from other sections.
One engine is in the root folder, the other is in the new folder.
Many are accustomed to the fact that the site on WordPress looks like a feed of articles with comments.
Therefore, the appearance of the main page ( http://iobninsk.ru/ ) usually causes surprise and the question - “Is this exactly WordPress?”.
At the moment, the main engine has 1915 articles and only one page (and that is empty and without a title).
In the settings of the engine, you can choose what is displayed on the main page - the latest entries, or a static page. I chose the latter. Since she is only one, I left her empty. And instead of managing its content through the WordPress editor, I edit the page.php file in the theme folder. This gives much more flexibility. In addition, the content on the main page changes very rarely.
In order for the site header to be uniform for both the main site and the news feed, I brought almost all the content of the caps to PHP-inclode, which is loaded into both engines from one place.
Now about the navigation. All content is available on the links from the drop-down menu. Billet menu took from here . Then, with a file, I adjusted it for a very long time in the direction of lightness, airiness and minimalism.
The most requested (vacation spots, shopping centers, sights, famous residents, main streets) led to the main page in the form of small blocks with text and pictures on lightboxes. It would be possible to bring the largest page to the main page, but the priority was given to those subsections, which, through the drop-down menu, were a long and dreary search.
Registration on the site is closed, regular comments are disabled (even the forms for them have been deleted). Instead, a comment widget from VKontakte, which is enough for the eyes.
The big bet is made on internal optimization and relink. In this regard, the portal is a lot like Wikipedia. There are almost no isolated articles left. Everything is interconnected. Including news feed. If certain persons, companies, events are mentioned in the news, there is almost always a link to the relevant article. I draw attention, not to the category and not to the tag (as on many other sites), namely, a direct link to the article.
CNC applied (nice URL). Without any categories and nesting. That is: site.ru/pagename
All graphics are not uploaded through the WordPress interface, but via FTP. And the name of the files corresponds to the URL of the page.
The standard photo size is 950x632 pixels. That is, the photo goes almost the entire width of the site (980 pixels).
Moreover, each photo is covered with a text copyright indicating the month and year of the shooting, which is very useful.
The portal is heavily used lightboxes. And for thumbnails and for photos that open when you click on a thumbnail, there is a uniform size everywhere - 150x100 and 640x426 pixels, respectively. The copyright is not applied to such photos.
Features of the content, atypical:
1. Section of attractions. In which everything interesting is collected that is in the city (with photos). All objects are marked on Yandex.Map, for each object there is a separate article with a brief text description.
If, for example, a monument to a famous person acts as a landmark, then the article will have an internal link to the material about this person.
2. Section about famous residents of the city. There are both figures of the present and figures of the past. Significance is determined by, among other things, the frequency of mentioning in the news. If a certain name has slipped more than 2-3 times in the news feed, then you need to make an article about a person, and link all references to this article.
3. Section about the streets. A separate page has been created for each street in the city. There is general information, photos of different years.
When an address is mentioned in the business directory (and not only in it), the street name is always an internal link.
In the near future, I will implement the second part of the plan - the listing in one form or another on the street page of all that is located on it. So that a person could search for a certain company not by name or by sphere of activity, but by the place in which it is located.
4. Regional orientation. Often, people are interested in not only what is now, but also what was before.
Suppose there was a certain shop three years ago. It has been added to the directory. Then he went broke. It will not be removed from the catalog, it will simply be transferred to the category of those that previously existed.
I ride a bike a lot in the city, I walk. Almost always with a camera. Therefore, I often take photos of facades of buildings, streets, signs, billboards and stretch marks. And I spread all this on the appropriate pages. This leads to the rapid growth of the content base. By the same time, the city is changing. And on these photos, standing nearby, you can track all these changes.
These photos are very interesting. In addition, I often drag them. As with my permission, and without it. This is especially true of journalists and editors of other urban resources. At the moments when they are writing an article about something, I want to illustrate it with a picture of the topic, and here it is just at hand.
5. Great attention is paid to literacy and text formatting. Long dashes, quotes, Christmas trees, paragraphs, bold. ALT-parameter and Title must be written to all pictures.
6. In the business directory there is no navigation bread crumbs. Instead, at the bottom of the page in a special gray mini-dice all the categories to which it belongs are listed.
7. Work is underway with a variety of archives. Newspapers of the city, private individuals, creative associations agreed to provide free of charge a huge amount of unique content (text and historical photos) for exclusive placement on the portal.
Business:
Here atypicalities even more. Since there is no portal:
- Contextual advertising (Yandex.Direct, Google Adsense and their ilk).
- Refs like SAPE (with TIC 50, PR 4, DMOZ).
- Affiliate buttons and teasers.
- Systems for dynamic sale of banner impressions.
- No flashing and flashing ads.
To work with the portal, the status of an individual entrepreneur was received, paying 6% of gross fees in taxes.
Work is conducted only with local advertisers under direct contracts, bypassing any intermediaries.
For sale banner with a size of 550x300 pixels under the title. And this is the only banner place.
A static image is used as a banner (JPG, or GIF without animation). And for this, a rotator is used (a simple PHP script written at my request many years ago). Due to this, any banner can appear on any page (or you just need to click on the page refresh button).
A link from a banner can lead either to an external website or to a company’s page in the portal’s business directory (if it does not have a website of its own).
But this is not the main source of income. Basis - premium placement in the business directory.
Here it is necessary to highlight this moment. All companies that are in the city are added to the catalog (no actions are required from them for this). They are provided with free basic accommodation in the core section. What does it mean: a separate page, one photo, a link to a corporate website, contact details.
After that (when Yandex ate the page and it took a worthy place in the search results) the company is offered to switch to premium.
Subsections decorated in the form of dies. By default, the plate is gray. Sorting alphabetically.
If the company starts paying money, the color of its plate changes to gold. Moreover, the module itself rises above all others and becomes wider. Additional photos are added to it + some paragraphs of the promotional text.
If there are several premium partners in one subcategory, then their modules are also ordered alphabetically among themselves.
Such is the business model.
If you have any questions, I will be happy to answer them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/186584/
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