The weather is still one of the most popular topics and a lot of Internet surfers regularly check for weather forecast on their phones or computers. When a visitor lands on your site and sees real-time and accurate weather, he may feel more at home and will be less likely to navigate away from your classifieds site to get the forecast elsewhere.
Wishing to help your site attract more visitors, we have developed a lot of free plugins for classifieds sites – the Weather Forecast Plugin was one of them. For a long time we used Yahoo API Weather Service to power the Plugin, but recently Yahoo suspended some of its services and eventually reconfigured the API making it impossible to use the Plugin.
New Front-End Features
Seeing the growing popularity in Weather Plugins for classifieds sites, we switched to a new and free service provided by OpenWeatherMap. Not only did we change the Weather Service API, but we decided to entirely re-configure the Plugin in the following ways:
- Came up with a set of new interfaces;
- Used weather icons font which makes it possible to change the icons’ color through CSS styles;
- The icons are based on vector graphics displaying perfectly on any device;
The Weather Forecast Plugin may be used for any type of classifieds sites, be it a real estate or a car classifieds site. If you choose to install it, visitors will get accurate weather forecasts when browsing your site. However, for the owners of real estate classifieds sites, the Plugin will come in especially handy as it will show users real-time weather in a place where they are intending to buy a property. Accurate weather information along with listing details will never be redundant.
Admin Panel Features
The Weather Forecast Plugin gives you quite a few customization options in the admin panel. Once activated, you will be able to:
- Set the default location and show the weather in one particular city, for instance, San Francisco;
- Configure the Plugin to display the weather based on a visitor’s location;
- Choose degree units in Celsius or Fahrenheit;
- Choose the position of the widget;
- Link the Plugin to a listing’s field group and more.
As you develop your classifieds site and build a loyal audience, you realize that even small details may win over the visitors and retain them on your site. The Weather Forecast Plugin for classifieds is one of such small but useful tools that will make your site more appealing to users.