You can use the Categories feature in your Gondola account to achieve many different objectives and customizations for your Gondola-powered website. In this article, we will go into detail on how to set up categories, and all of their use cases.
Here are some of the most common use cases for the Category Feature in Gondola:
Simplifying the visitor experience and product navigation for your site by grouping products/tours into similar categories. For example, if you are running a Boat tour business and have 15+ tours including a myriad of public tours, private tours, single day trips, multi day trips, etc., instead of having your visitor scroll through the entire home page to see what type of trip they want to book, they can clearly see what types of tours you offer and browse whatever is most applicable to them.
Creating an affiliate page for other companies you want to partner with. You can create a category and title it "Other [enter your location] Fun" and then create individual products/tours for affiliate and assign it to that category.
Highlighting a specific tour for a special event, promotion, etc. If you are running a special "Independence Day" event, you can create a Category and add all the promotional information for the event and just attach one product/tour to the category. This will highlight the product/tour on your site to draw more attention to it.
There are likely many more use cases that you could find and use the Category feature for, but these are the most common.
To create a category, follow these steps:
Login to your Gondola Account
Navigate to Products:
Click on Categories and then click Add a Category:
Here you can add any and all information you would like to your category page, starting with high level Category Information.
Set the Category Name and choose its status: Active or Not Active. The Active status will publish the category to your website and show up in two different places:
1. A tours dropdown in your website header navigation
2. A Clickable category with a thumbnail featured image just above the list of products on your Home Page.
Selecting "Not Active" will create the product, but hide it from your website visitors.
Next, you can assign any saved Tours/products you have on your Gondola platform to the category:
Select a Category Image to be displayed as the featured image for the category. This will show up in the category header as well as the thumbnail on the home page:
Add introductory information (Title, Subtitle, Description) to your category. This will show up at the top of the category page and introduce the category to your website visitors. You can also add additional images that will show up to the right of the description, similar to the additional photos on your product pages:
Finally, add Category Highlights and additional information to further sell your site visitors on the details of this category:
Once you have added all the information necessary and attached all of the products/tours you like, click Save in the top right corner:
Your Category is now live on your site! It could take a couple of minutes to sync with the back-end code, so if you reload your site and do not see changes, wait about 5 minutes, refresh, and try again.
If, at any point, you want to re-arrange the categories in the header navigation menu or on your home page, just submit a change request through your website's Pastel Interface. Our implementation team will clarify any questions and get to work on your request!
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