It’s not often I get to work in-person with a client, as most software projects are are organised via Zoom & email. So it’s been great fun working with another Reading-based business on a coding project.
The “Disturb me” table
Most Thursdays, I work from a co-working space in Reading. In part, for a change of scenery away from the home-office. But also because The Curious Lounge is a fun place to hang out. There’s an array of desks with people typing, zooming and generally being productive. Then there’s the big table near the coffee counter where things are more relaxed.
It’s a place where you can work… and chat.
A couple of months ago, I was chatting with a guy about startups, technology and web stuff. It turns out that Jet is the main guy behind VerifyTrusted – a review aggregator platform that takes reviews from multiple sources and aggregates them into a single feed. It’s neat stuff, but they didn’t have a clean WordPress integration.
Let’s fix that with a little partnership software project.
More reach with a WordPress plugin
There are already tons of Google reviews plugins for WordPress, but they’re mostly bloated and kill page-speed. Worse still… they’re usually overloaded with up-sell nags in the WP admin area. I hate that.
With version one of our new plugin, we’re going for a more elegant solution. We’ve built a straightforward WordPress plugin that simply pulls a business’ review feed from VerifyTrusted’s servers, then renders it into with a shortcode.
Once our plugin has been approved for inclusion in the WordPress plugin repository, we’ll be inviting all Headwall Hosting customers to try it out.
Then we’ll get stuck in to development of some new features, including built-in structured data for the LocalBusiness object, with the reviews feed included in the data. This is a natural win for crawlers like GoogleBot, because they love rich structured data from verifiable sources.
It’s been a fun project so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this business partnership leads.