I recently released in a new plugin in the WordPress plugin repository. It allows you to create interactive maps of the world, continents or any country in the world.
It was kind of a soft launch, as I’m still polishing out some features, but the plugin is ‘production ready’. I’ll be slowly marketing it to potential users. You can already visit the official website for some demos.
This plugin is a spinoff of my previous Interactive World Maps plugin, which is doing well, but needed a revamp. I decided to develop one from scratch and make a free version available. This new version uses the powerful amcharts library which provides hundreds of maps, all of them available in the plugin.
Colour regions/countries, setup a hover colour and click actions, like open a link when the region or country is clicked;
Add markers to any location on a map based on coordinates. Setup a hover colour and click actions;
Choose different projections (Mercator, Miller, Albers…);
Include or exclude specific regions of the selected map.
I plan to expand the plugin and include custom maps that are not available in the amcharts library. In particular maps of specific popular cities and region maps of my home country Portugal.
I’ve created a demo page where you can preview all maps currently available, which are more than 200.
There are a few reasons why you might need to automatically delete comments based on date. For maintenance or even performance.
A while back me and my friend Pedro Carvalho where working a project that needed this feature for legal reasons. We developed a plugin and decided to release it in the WordPress plugin repository with the permission of the project managers.
Delete Old Comments is very simple, non intrusive plugin. It will provide you a few options to automate the task of deleting comments based on age. They can either be sent to trash or permanently deleted.
Most websites online will need a contact form and Contact form 7 is without any doubt one of the most popular plugins on WordPress with 5+ million active installations and growing. It’s amazing how simple and versatile the plugin is, allowing any form to be extended using simple tricks.
The plugin comes with support for ‘date’ fields, but for some projects you might need a datetime field. There’s a plugin by inputWP that can help you with this and I’ll explain how you can use it with CF7.
Although the plugin was not built to work directly with CF7, it’s compatible with any form you might have on your website, Contact Form 7 included. You’ll just need to follow some simple steps.
Add a normal text field to your form
The first step is to build your form. For the fields you want to convert into datetime fields, simply use text fields. You can name the field whatever you want, but you will need to pay attention to the class name you add:
It doesn’t necessarily need to be ‘datefield‘ it just needs to be something unique and that you remember after, when setting up the Date and Time Field plugin.
Setup Date and Time Field plugin
Once you have your form, you need to go to Settings > DateTime Picker. In the CSS Selector option, add the name of your class, preceded by a . (period). In this case .datefield This will be the css selector the plugin will use to look for the field and convert it into a date and time field:
And that’s it! You can explore the other settings available in the plugin to optimize the date time picker.
Guided selling is a process to help potential buyers find the best product or service according to their needs and expectations. They can be product finder tools, online shopping assistants or product suggestions engine for example. In the world of online shopping, guided selling is a powerful tool that any shop owner should use to engage users and connect the right products or services with potential customers based on their interests.
What needs to be done?
The process is simple to understand:
Engages users
A visually appealing interactive experience captures users attention, keeping them on the site longer and encourages them to come back.
Understand their needs Asking the right questions will keep your visitor engaged and it will provide you valuable information to understand what they’re looking for.
Provide tailored product or service suggestions
Once you have information about the expactactions and needs of your potential buyer, you should be able to provide an informed and tailored product or service suggestion.
Increase conversions Getting a tailored product or service suggestion that meets all the users needs and expectations, will most likely result in a successful sale.
Search Filters vs Guided Selling
Advanced search filters for WooCommerce are a popular solution, but sometimes it can be overwhelming for the user to understand all the technical attributes and abstract features. Guided selling solutions, like product wizards, follow a needs-oriented paradigm that facilitates exploration and inspiration, becoming more friendly to the user. It provides a emotional experience and not a rational one, which should engage the user even more. While search filters might result in a ‘Match not found’, the guided selling solution should be able to present close alternatives when there isn’t an exact match.
The search filters are an essential feature that your WooCommerce website should have but an interactive guided selling tool can complement that and can be a great way to initially attract potential buyers to your website.
Introducing Advisor Quiz for WordPress
There weren’t many solutions to build guided selling tools for WooCommerce, but lately this is changing. The new Advisor Quiz plugin will allow you to build a quiz that will act as a guided selling tool, a products suggestion engine.
Although it’s essentially a Quiz Builder, it has a particular feature that will allow you to build guided selling solutions. It allows you to build a ‘Content Advisor’ quiz, where you can create questions where the answers will act as content filters. With this plugin and a bit of creativity you should be able to create a guided selling tool that will engage your users, get you leads and improve conversions.
You can create an interactive dialogue system, a product wizard that will provide shoppers with personalized suggestions. The user answers a couple of questions and the plugin will analyse the user’s answers, converting them into product features/categories/attributes and match them against available products in the background. At the end of the quiz, the user is presented with a list of suitable products. With the right combination of questions and answers, you’ll understand the users’s individual preferences and assist them in finding products that fit their needs. This will also increase shopper’s confidence and encourage the online purchase.
Working with WooCommerce
You can filter WooCommerce products based on the following:
Keyword A word in the description or product title.
Categories
The most common way of separating and identifying the different groups of products.
Tags
Another way of labeling the products that can help identifying their characteristics.
Attributes Depending on your products, these attributes can change. They can identify sizes and colours for example. These are yet another way of identifying your products.
Other fields
Price and dimensions are other fields that can be used as a factor when searching for products.
Considering the available fields you can use to narrow down your products, you should think of questions you can ask your users in order to understand their needs and connect this needs to the available filter parameters. Each answer will correspond to a filter and in the end all filters will be merged and search will be performed to find the matches. You can also setup dependent questions, that will only display if users selected a specific answer on a previous question. The possibility are endless.
Be Creative
The plugin by itself, won’t do much, the potential will lie in the quiz you create. It needs to be appealing to your visitors, it should keep them engaged. Don’t ask boring questions, be creative and make your user feel you’re asking the right question. The questions and answers need to be well crafted for it to become engaging and at the same time provide information about their needs that you can use to filter the available products.
Study your Visitors Behaviour
The plugin will track usage activity (anonymous or not if consent is given at the end to share more data) that will provide you valuable data to understand what you’re users are looking for. This might help you improve the quiz or even build a better one. You can track referrals, answers selected and conversions among other things.
Conclusion
Although there aren’t many guided selling plugins for WooCommerce, Advisor Quiz is a tool to take into consideration. You can explore it’s potential and with a bit of creativity you can carefully craft a product advisor tool that will engage your users and improve your conversions. You can find the plugin exclusively on Envato Market.
