The MagManager directory lets you display a ready-made directory of your advertisers directly on your business website.

By default, MagManager will pick up all advertisers in your current publications, and will update on the 1st of the month. You can choose whether some of your clients are always included or never included on the directory. When you update client details in MagManager, these immediately show in the directory.

Each of the clients you include will be displayed as a business card containing their contact details. You can also add a short piece of text and a logo if you choose. Visitors to your website can click on icons that take them straight to your client’s website or social media pages.

You can customise the appearance of the directory to match your branding. Your clients will be organised by sections (or categories) and website visitors click on the section title to view the advertisers in that section. These screenshots show how your directory might look- visit www.thevoicemagazines.co.uk/directory to see this directory live.

Example 1: Directory with location options

 

Example 2: Directory with description and logos

If you have website or social media details entered for the client, these will show with an icon link that will take visitors directly there- the client’s website will open in a new browser tab.

 

Customising The Directory

Click on the Gear Icon, top right of the screen > Under the Settings heading select Web Directory >Here you will find two tabs, the Preview Directory tab and the Select Adverts tab.

Preview Directory tab

The first tab is the place to find the code you need to give to your website developer, so they can display the directory on your website. This code depends on the selections you make using the drop-down menus, they provide options to how your directory is displayed (as described below). You can also customise your directory using your own brand styles. When you have chosen from the drop-down menus, you will see a preview of your directory.

Copying your code

Choose the settings you want in the “Style” and “Publication Choice” drop-down boxes, and then copy the JavaScript code in the blue box. Your website developer can insert this on your website, replacing ‘Element Id’ with the id of the element they want the directory to load into (for example, <div id=”my_directory”></div>).

NOTE: You only have to set the options for your code once: choosing the month in the “Select a month to preview” dropdown menu is just for the purposes of letting you preview your directory.

NOTE: It isn’t possible to simply add JavaScript to a page or post in WordPress; see the Appendix for notes on adding JavaScript to a WordPress website.

Example of the code when added to a WordPress website:

 

Display options

From the Preview Directory tab, drop-down menus allow you to select the following:

• Section and category styles from the Styles drop-down
• Whether to include a publication filter from the Publication Choice drop-down
• A choice of month to preview

Section and category style options

You can choose whether to organise your clients by their MagManager “Sections”, “Sub Categories” or by Sections and Sub Categories (in MagManager Categories are sub-divisions of Sections). You might want to tidy your sections a bit, to ensure you don’t have too many sections with similar names, for example.

Here the “Sections and Sub Categories” option was selected, so clients are organised in the form Section / Category.

 

Publication Choice options

You can choose to let visitors to the directory filter for advertisers in a single area based on your different publications. The default here is “none”. You can choose to display a list of your publications either as badges or a drop-down list.

 The screenshot below shows a directory with the individual publications showing as badges:

Alternatively, you can choose to display a dropdown list for your areas:

 

Month preview options

By selecting a month from the drop-down menu, you can preview your directory for the month of your choice. The directory will by default show advertisers in your current issues and will be updated on the first day of the month of your new publication. So, if you have bi-monthly editions for October/November and December/January, the directory will be updated on 1st October and again on 1st December.

Customising the directory with your own branding

Click on the Gear Icon, top right of the screen > Under the Settings heading select Web Directory, and you will see options for adding your branding. You can enter the colours you want for the text and the background in the section headers of the directory. These should be entered as html hex codes. You can also enter html font styles. There is a box headed “Other Styles” where you can enter more css code.

Selecting advertisers based on advert size

If you want to restrict which advertisers are included in your directory based on their advert size.  Click on the Gear Icon, top right of the screen > Under the Settings heading select Web Directory and choose the Select Adverts tab.

You can use the toggles next to each listed advert size to select which advertisers to include. (The list includes all advert sizes available in MagManager: not all of these will be relevant to you).

Display settings for clients

Editing your clients’ details straight from the directory

From the Preview Directory screen (Gear Icon > Settings -Web Directory > Preview Directory Tab), when you select display options and a preview month, you will see a preview of your directory. You can click on the details of any of your clients from here and you will be taken directly to the Details tab for that client in MagManager, where you can make any amendments. As soon as you click “update” in MagManager and refresh the page on your website, the changes will show in the online directory.

‘Manage listing” for an individual client

On the Details tab for an individual client, click the “Manage Listing” button which is found under the Web & Social section. This opens the “Edit listing” box, which gives you various options about how your listing for that client will display. You can optionally add extra text and small images to the listing and format it using the button on the editor toolabar. Clicking the </> button allows you to edit the html code.

TIP: For best results, upload images you want to use as small files of around 100px for a square image, or a maximum of 220px wide for a rectangular image.  Ensure it's an image file (JPG/PNG) and not a PDF.

Address, Telephone and Mobile options

You may have personal address and telephone numbers for some of your clients which should not be displayed in the directory. Or, the address you have in MagManager might be the headquarters address you use for invoices, rather than the local business address. You can choose hide address, telephone or mobile fields for an individual client by toggling the appropriate switches. You can enter a different telephone number in the “Contact Number” box. (If you leave this field blank the default phone number will show up, unless you have the telephone switches toggled off).

TIP: If you want none of your mobile phone numbers to show in the directory, you can hide all of them by entering the following css code to the “Other Styles” text-box in the Web Directory Preview page:

.companymob { display:none; }

 

Listing

Here you can add additional details about the client.

The is a character limit of 2000 which includes, newlines, tabs and spaces.  Also avoid the use of "Quotation Marks" as it's a copy and paste on a mac.

 

Using the “always include” and “never include” switches

By default, all the advertisers in the current issue of your publications will be included in the directory, so from 1st September, advertisers in your September issue will be included, and this will change on the first day of the month of your next issue.

You can use the Directory Preview (described above) to see which clients will display in a given month. If you want a client to always be in the directory regardless of whether they are currently advertising, or if you never want a particular client included, you will find the appropriate switches in the Edit Listing box.

 

Web Directory SEO - Google Listing

When using the MagManager Web Directory, the clients won't appear in SEO listings as the content is dynamic. i.e. every time the page loads the content that appears is completely different based on the rules you have  applied in your MagManager account.  The code that you add to your website generates the listings based on various bits of data in MagManager, like if the client has a booking etc.
 
For this reason Google can't include it in the search because the data is changing all the time and it can't be sure that if a company is there today that they will be there tomorrow.  It's data displayed is not like a news story that once published is there and never changes.

Appendix

Adding JavaScript code to WordPress websites

WordPresss is designed to separate code from content, so you will need to ask your website developer to add the JavaScript for the directory to the files of your website.

However, if you have some knowledge of how WordPress works, you could install a plugin to enable the scripts, as described in this article:

https://uk.godaddy.com/blog/3-ways-insert-javascript-wordpress-pages-posts

Using an iframe instead of JavaScript

Alternatively, you might like to insert the directory using an iframe, which you can enter into a page in WordPress.

To access the code - Click on the Gear Icon, top right of the screen > Under the Settings heading select Web Directory >On the Preview Directory tab >  find your unique api from the code in the blue box containing the javascript- it is a long string of letters and numbers inside quotes next to getMMDirectory.

You can then use the following html code, replacing your-key with the your unique api key.

<iframe src="https://www.magmanager.co.uk/service/webdirectory?apikey=your-key" width = 100% height = 800px allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe>

If you want to add a filter for your publications, add:
your-key&publications=true

If you want to add a filter for your publications with badges rather than a dropdown menu, add:
your-key&publications=true&badges=true

By default, your advertisers will be arranged by section. To arrange advertisers by Category instead, add: your-key&type=2

To arrange advertisers by Section/Category, add:
your-key&type=3

If you want to organise by Category and use the publications filter, add:
your-key&type=2&publications=true&badges=true

 

 

Trouble Shooting:

Q - Clients with a specific advert size are not appearing in the web directory.

A - The advert size is likely to be switched off.  Go to the main settings page > Under Settings > Select Web Directory > Click the Select Adverts tab > Locate the advert size, the toggle switch will be grey (off), click to turn it on (green).

 

Q- The headers appear but the clients are not pulling through.

A - Take the first heading Aeriel Installers - If you right-click Aerial Installers and inspect element - you will see bookingcontainers with the advertisers in there. So MagManager is providing the data but your website is blocking it.

 

 

The solution is you need to add JQuery to your site. Here's a link to some notes on that - https://www.askquesty.com/post/add-jquery-squarespace-tutorial

 

Q- Will this work with a Square Space Website?

A - As of February 2022 it will not work with their basic plan.  A user has advised us that Square Space now require you to upgrade the plan. 

They may be blocking the use of external scripts.  However they definitely allow javascript as standard.  Below is a link to the javascript code

https://www.magmanager.co.uk/Scripts/webdirectory.js

 

Q - Is the web directory opptimised for Keywords and SEO

A - No the individual listings pulled through from MagManager for the directory are not optimised for Google or SEO.  If you're using WordPress you could add the Keywords to the SEO settings on the page you add the web directory code to.

 

Q- How does the search work

A - The search words are picked up from the word being in any part of the client record pulled through from MagManager to the web directory, so that includes, the client name, address, the additional text added in the editor and the section name.