Cottage Tips provides useful information to help cottage owners take full advantage of their properties, and have a great time while at it!
For this website, I first had to create a logo. The owner wanted a logo that would be friendly, and convey the idea of the great outdoors:
Cottage Tips' Logo
Also, since the website’s content changes on a regular basis, the client needed to be able to update the site on his own. WordPress is a very flexible platform that allows site owners to maintain their own content without having to know much about coding.
To generate revenue, Cottage Tips features content-relevant banner ads. The client has the option to set up ads by tip category, or specific to each tip. To achieve this, WordPress was integrated with OpenX which allow webmasters to manage different advertisers in one place.
Since the goal of Cottage Tips is to create a vibrant community where people can comment and exchange ideas, a forum was added to the site: Cottage Tips’ Teams. bbPress is the forum by the creators of WordPress, and it fits like a glove. Users who register in the forum can also comment on blog posts, and create their own profiles.
Cottage Tips' Teams
Other features of the site include:
- Polls: people can vote on questions posed by the editor.
- Shopping: a list of goods and services recommended by the editor.
- Search: full functioning search engine.
- Tips Archive: where all tips are posted by category.
- Social Networking: people can share tips and blog posts via Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, etc.
- Backups: automatic backups are generated, and saved into Dropbox.