How to Create a Restaurant Directory in WordPress

Key Takeaways

this video is brought to you by monster insights in this video I'm going to walk you through how to create a business directory for your website and specifically I'm going to walk you through how to create a restaurant directory for your town or your neighborhood or your city now Google Places or Google Maps is a great place for people to showcase and see the results around them sometimes you need something that you can customize a little bit better or a little bit easier and this allows you to give restaurant owners a way to share if they have modified times that they're open if they've changed to direct delivery or takeout or curbside pickup and things like that you can also showcase an area where they can share their gift cards where people can purchase it as well as they can share the order forms for their restaurant so with that let's dive in the feather we're going to use is by using a really robust and an great plugin called formidable forms formidable forms simply is a way to take information in a regular form format but it also does a lot of other things with it so you can take the information with this and then you can give it in a way that is viewable to people through their views area you can also automate a lot of this and with formidable forms you can also do things like accept payments and things like that so with that make sure you head over to formidable forms to get the form and think about it as something a little bit more than that because once you add a business directory you can also use this software to do things like calculations for your website several other things if you want to do listings for people like real estate listings and things like that it's just very robust so head over there and get the formidable forms plug-in then you'll want to come back to your wordpress dashboard and we're going to go to plugins add new and now we need to install the plugin that we just downloaded so we're going to go upload plugin and then we'll do choose file and then we'll need to go find the plugin that we just downloaded so form the bull forms and we'll install it once you install it you will also want to stick around to activate the plug-in as well great now that we have it you see that pro is installed and you will want to add our license key you can either do it here from the plugins area or you can come back here to formidable forms tab and do it there so we'll click on this to go to the license page and you can either connect it or you can get it or you can enter it manually here so let's connect it and it's activating so we're good to go now what we need to do is set up a forum so that people can add their restaurant or their business to do that we'll go over to forms area and we'll click add new and you see that there are several to choose from or you could also just create it from scratch we're actually just going to start with the contact us one and we'll build on it for that so I'm gonna change this and put restaurant and that's really for your information so we're going to create that it's going to go out and create this template bring in the fields that it already has and then we can get started so I'm going to make some changes to this I want to do like business name their web address they're linked to their coupon page and maybe some dates or when they're open or curbside pickup if they have a checklist of curbside pickup and things like that so create I'm gonna add a website URL and I might I think I'm gonna need to because I want to showcase their website our URL and then I also want to create another one where they accept gift cards or gift certificates and then they can add a link to that here which there are several online gift cards that you can create and if not all we're also doing a video on how to create gift cards for yourself now another thing is if some people take gift cards over the phone where they're going to mail you out their gift card there are some restaurants who aren't quite up to the online version but they're happy to send out a gift card through the mail or accept a gift card from the phone so we can do that okay so that's pretty good you might want to make some changes to it but that's a pretty good setup that we're going to start with so what we can do is update that okay now that it's updated we can put it on our website so what we want to do is going to head over to pages because I want to give it a page where they can add and fill out this information and so we're going to give it a name under a block you can either click on the plus button and start looking for formidable so it's a formidable form that we're wanting to add here and it's the add restaurant form and then that's going to bring this in and what you can do above it is just that little bit of information ok then we want to take a look at it and that looks pretty good there might be some design features that you might want to change and/or even change the submit button we can do that as well but let's do the next step but the next step what we want to do is once somebody fills this out then we want to show all of the restaurants that we have on the site so let's set up a view so that we can add it so that people can see it all the information that is in that form so we're going to go back to forms and we're going to edit the restaurant form and up here instead of building it we want to showcase the views area and there currently no view so we need to create a view and basically all the view means is once somebody fills out the information the entries that are filled out we are able to showcase all of the entries and all the data in a reliable way or in a view that looks really good so you can do a few different formats here you can just do a list of all the entries which is pretty good you can do just a single entry so each one has its own page you can do both which I did and it looks really good so you're showing a list and then when they click on it they see more information this is pretty simple so you can start off with just the entry page but maybe we'll look and see what that looks like with also the dynamic you can also do a calendar that would be more for events and not really what we're looking for so for this one and just for the ease of it we're gonna do all entries and they'll simply show in a listed format so since we're showing everything on here I'm gonna go to text and I'm going to right-click and paste this and this is basically just some simple HTML to kind of showcase the information a little bit you can go a lot better with the design but I just want to show you what this looks like so basically I need to update these IDs for the IDS that I have and if you click on fields' under customize these are all of the fields that we can bring over so for instance under about I want to do the message so then I click on that and that brings over at that field under strong I want to I want this one to be the website URL so we're gonna do that and here I want this to be the name so it's the name is in hyperlink so I'm going to do that here and about that's just saying about and then names the company name and then for the message that's 71 so that's basically what they wrote in their message area about their company and their next URL is 73 and what you can do with this one is this is a shortcode that I'll type in 73 for this field and we say we want to make it clickable so we want it to maybe for them to be able to click on it and open it up because it's another URL then down here I simply created another button and you can do button you can do button and I'm making this a URL and we want that to be for the gift card URLs so that's 73 and I need to update these labels so I know more and then the hyperlink will say bye and then the business name or the restaurant name gift card so I want to change this to the name which is 67 and that looks pretty good so what we can do is let's go ahead and publish this and then I want to create a new page so that you can see all of the listings so let's do that next we're going to go to add new because I want to showcase all the listings call it local restaurants and just like when we added the form we want to do the same thing we want to add a view so you can either click on the plus or you can do a forward slash and do start typing in formidable and instead of a form this time we're going to do a view and we need to choose the view that we just created and now we'll click publish now there are no entries found so it's not going to showcase so let's go ahead and add something here and then go to the forum so that we can add a restaurant and then we'll add the restaurant okay so I like it that they said it's submitted successfully that's great and then what we can also do is go to the pages and see the local restaurants so now we can go here open it in a new link and now it's showing that so see how it's coming up here the thing I don't like and that will be fixing next is once they is you notice how when they add the restaurant then we said we added the restaurant and everything and then it just said thanks we'll be in touch what we want to do is actually redirect them from filling it out to then showcasing all of the local restaurants so let's do that so we're going to go back into the forum I'm gonna go to settings and then scrolling down on submit we need to tell it what we want it to do so you can redirect URL that's usually external URL not on our site or we can show a page content we're going to show page content and we're going to select that page so I want to redirect them to local restaurants once they do that great so then we can click update and but only if they need it do they offer curbside pickup but they don't do delivery and let's go ahead and add the restaurant so now when we added it it redirected us and so now we can start seeing both of those and now people are going to go through here and look at all the items and then pick and what's best for them or what they're wanting so that's really cool the other thing you might want to do is as these grow there's a couple of things you may want to do maybe you want to just showcase the name and then allow people to click on it and then they get all of the details so coming back up here into our add restaurant form and we've got the view and we just said let's do all those things so instead what we want to do is we want to do both dynamic and single entry and that's where some of the power of this comes in so I'm gonna highlight all of this and copy and I'll come up here in I want to do both dynamic and single listing and that changes up a little bit of what we have some going to go to the detail page and the details page is where what we just wrote all of that that will be now on the details page and then on the listings phaser will simply have their name and that's to kind of keep that front page nice and clean now that I moved everything over to the details page I want to go back to the listings page and under here I'm going to right click and paste this in and then I want to make sure I get the name so it's 67 and what this is doing is it's going to give me an h3 or a subheading with a detail link to that business thing and update that so you can see what that looks like let's go back it's view these local businesses great and now you see they're just one by one and then the detail page we click on that and then it'll go to the details of just that single page and that looks a little bit cleaner and a little bit more manageable for you so now we have two pages we have the add a restaurant and we have the local restaurants that show all of the restaurants for us the next thing we want to do is we want to clean up our menu area so that we can showcase those we can do that by going back to our dashboard and then from here you simply want to go down to appearance menus so we can make adjustments here now your theme might be a little bit different just know that this is the main menu for this theme and we're just going to clean some things up on a keep home I'll keep blog I'm going to remove shop now I want to add a couple I'll add the local and add a restaurant there and we'll save the menu now we can go and look and now we see local restaurants or add a restaurant so you can click on that to see the local restaurants here and then as you're growing this directory one of the other things you'll want to do is install and use something like mustard insights mustard insights will tell you just how many people are coming to your website and will give you reports straight in your dashboard it's the easiest way to connect with Google Analytics so you see how your website is doing straight from here to get started you can head over to monster insights comm and make sure you use promo code WP be VIP to get the best discount on monster insights and thanks for watching