VO Store Locator

The VO Store Locator WordPress Plugin Story

A client asked us to create a map directory to showcase his swim instruction classed around Florida and make it easy for his visitors to find locations close to them.

When we looked over the offerings in the WordPress Plugin Directory at that time in 2015, we were disappointed by the confusing setups and slow performing offerings. We had a lot of Google Map experience by this time and thought we would give it a try by just building our own.

So creating the solution for his site, we were able to test it through his busy spring & summer season of registrations. It ran so great that we decided to add it to the WordPress Plugin directory.

We ♥ WordPress and it’s community of developers! We thought the perfect way to give back to them, was to offer a free plugin in the “Store Locator Plugin” category. So we started giving it away on June 15, 2015. When the positive feedback started to pour in, we started to realized just how many sites & people were really getting helped by this little plugin.

So we started to pour more effort into the plugin and added feature after feature, one of which was designing a ridiculously simply drag and drop layout customization tool. Some people need some advanced capability that typically needed our support (UTF-8 character sets and properly being able to import and locate international addresses). So we added a low-cost “Pro-Add-On” to help those who needed it out.

We were pleasantly surprise to see all the global love streaming in. We started to get offers to translate the interface into different languages from all over the globe. So we started to offer the plugin in different languages and the active installs continued to grow.

Now hundreds of sites run VO Store Locator plugin and we not finished yet. We turned around and pushed most of our Pro-Add-On customization feature down into the free plugin, making it the most customizable store locator you can get for free. And with the extra room in the Pro-Add-On we reached out to our current users and asked, what are the features you need to supercharge your site and business?

So now focusing on helping marketers, franchise owners, wholesalers and distributors, we are pushing out the next round of smile inducing features.

To be continued…