How a gardening business owner used Modern Business Pro and the Conductor plugin to make a WordPress website with room to grow.
Avery Gardens is a gardening business and landscape maintenance business based in the United Kingdom with a strong client base and great work ethic. The owner wanted a site that brought attention to the accolades and professional work of his company.
He turned to the Modern Business Pro WordPress theme and the Conductor plugin to solve this problem.
Take a tour as we show you how he used these tools to build his site.
Adding a Logo to WordPress
The first thing you will notice on the Avery Gardens website is the logo on the top left of any page. Modern Business Pro offers an easy area to implement a logo in the general options.
Once Modern Business Pro is installed, you can go to the Appearance > Theme Options and upload a logo from your hard drive, as the owner did here.
Call to Action Header text
You will also notice to the right of the logo a cool space to display contact information and even the address of your business. This is an exclusive Modern Business widget called Address Widget.
Modern Business also has its own built-in Widget Area called “Header Call to Action”, which allows you to place anything in the space on the top right.
Simply paste Address Widget in the Header Call to Action are and add a title and address, or other content, to the content area of the widget.
You could even put an image there!
Maybe even a contact or subscribe form??
Add an image slider to the front page
After you get past the navigation bar, you get to a large slider image. How do we pull that off?
You can use the Modern Business Pro provided “Front Page Slider” Widget Area where you can place a slider widget. In the past, we have recommended Soliloquy Pro to our customers, but the owner of Avery Gardens chose to use Flexslider, from WooThemes, the makers of WooCommerce and other popular WordPress plugins.
The Front Page slider area is designed to display content at the top of the front page and was originally designed for use with image sliders.
Add a Hero Space for “About” text
Going down the page, you will notice two separate paragraphs of text that explain the credentials of Avery Gardens and provide some textual content about the business and the credentials of the owner.
Modern Business also features a specially formatted text widget called “Hero Space Widget” which can be placed in the “Front Page” widget area — also special to Modern Business theme.
You can enter the text for each section in the widget and it will display in two separate paragraphs on the front page.
Displaying a big call to action box can make a splash and get someone to contact you or visit an internal page. Avery Gardens accomplishes this by using the Call to Action widget provided by the Modern Business theme.
The “CTA Widget” displays text content and links in a box format that brings attention to a sentence or mission statement. On Avery Gardens, this manifests itself in the text: “Want to find out more?….” (shown in screenshot below)
To add the box, you would place the CTA Widget in the Front Page or Front Page Slider widget area under Appearance > Widgets, and it styles itself in the color and font of the rest of the site! Pretty neat.
WordPress Slideshow Plugin:
Avery Gardens uses a cool little plugin to display a slideshow on the front page called Image Horizontal Reel Scroll Slideshow to display an image gallery of some of the Avery Garden client-base.
After installing the Image Horizontal Reel Scroll Slideshow plugin, you will create an image gallery like you normally would on WordPress, by going to “Add Media” while editing the page and creating a gallery. At the last step, when choosing the way to display the gallery, you will select the new “Slideshow” option.
If you want to show it on the front page using our tech like Avery Gardens has, you will want to drag the widget included with the plugin into the “Front Page” widget area.
You will choose what images to use by going to the image management section of the plugin, found under the “Settings” sidebar on the WordPress dashboard.
Using Conductor on the Front Page
The next thing you will see moving down the page is some more information about the site and a contact form to the right side of the page. This is accomplished using a new premium WordPress plugin known as Conductor. With Conductor, you can display your content the way YOU want to on different posts and pages.
Conductor is featured in a few different sections, and while Conductor works with most any WordPress theme for displaying content in unique ways, it was built from the start with Modern Business Pro and our other Slocum Themes in mind.
You can learn more about how Conductor works here.
Looking at the front page of Avery Gardens, here are the elements of the page that have been created with Conductor widgets to display content in a smart way:
Contact Form
About Page
Testimonials
Awards and Accolades
About Page
The “About” Page is shown by using Conductor to show one, large post and choosing to display the title, content, featured image, and read more button. But with Conductor, you could just as easily choose to not display some of these elements.
Awards and Accreditations
With Conductor plugin, you can display specific posts, custom post types, pages, or widgets, in different sizes (small, medium, or large). The awards and accreditations section is created by displaying many, small awards and accreditations (a custom post type created by Avery Gardens). You can view this in the gallery above, but you will see that conductor is displaying three smaller boxes with some text and the featured image to showcase some of the awards and accreditations that Avery Gardens has earned over the years.
“Our Packages” and “What People Say”
The internal pages for “Our Packages” and “What People Say” are also created using Conductor and displaying small displays of content.
Building a Gardening Business Website
You can see that with the power of Modern Business Pro and Conductor, the team at Avery Gardens was able to bring attention to their awards, accolades, and testimonials while building strong Call to Action areas to increase sales.
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