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faq pages

Weekly Links Roundup – Google Maps, FAQ Pages, Stripe vs Paypal, MemberPress

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

If you have a Google map in your site, or have tried to add one recently, and found that following the instructions for getting a Maps API Key (cryptic for many users at the best of times) are no longer working? This is because this summer Google made changes in its Maps API offerings. Now, an API key is definitely required (before it was not, not always anyway) and a credit card has to be on file in the Google account in order for the API key to validate.

This is not to say that you’ll be billed – everyone is given $200 in credit each month. Many sites will never come close to this limit (I calculated it as about 29,000 views on one client site, much more traffic than they currently receive) and you can also cap the visits so that it never goes over the usage limit. But still, requiring a credit card is an extra hassle for my clients who will have to set up their own billing in order to keep using Google Maps.

More information on this from WP Google Maps, my WordPress map plugin of choice.

Considering an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page for your business site? FAQ pages are a great way to address the common questions you get about your products or services, and serve as a way to both educate users and help move them deeper into your site. Here’s a guide to 25 FAQ pages and the reasons why they’re so effective at what they do.

If you run an ecommerce site or are planning to, here’s a nice post comparing Stripe and Paypal, two of the most popular payment processors. I love Stripe – one of the reasons is it’s a lot easier for me to deal with Stripe reporting for my accounting than Paypal. But both have their pros and cons – read the post to learn more and make your own decision.

Finally… I’ve mentioned MemberPress before; it’s one of the easiest membership plugins I’ve used. Here’s a new post about MemberPress and why it might be all you need in a membership plugin. The article discusses the plugin’s features and why it stands out from other popular membership plugins.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

 

Pretty FAQs

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There are many ways to create an FAQ page, some more useful and usable than others. Here I’ll talk a few that I see often, and make a suggestion on a better way to handle FAQs.

#1 – The simple list.

This goes something like this.

Question 1
Answer 1 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa.

Question 2
Answer 2 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa.

Question 3
Answer 3 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa.

This is okay… it’s certainly easy to read. With the bold headlines it’s easy to scan.This is a popular solution, but if you have a large number of question/answer pairs it can become quite a long page to scan.

#2 – Link list to answers.

This goes like this (note the links don’t work, this is too short to illustrate that functionality):

Question 1
Question 2
Question 3

Answer 1 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa.

Answer 2 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa.

Answer 3 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean commodo ligula eget dolor. Aenean massa.

Again, this can become very long. It also forces the user to bounce back and forth between the list at the top and the questions below – you’d want to insert ‘back to top’ links strategically in the answer list. And you’ll need to create the links from the questions and the link anchors for each answer, it can be a lot of work for a big FAQ page.

#3 – Accordion.

This is the solution I use most often. It gives extra interactivity and feedback for the user, and works well for a long FAQ list because the questions and answers are presented in a very compact format. There’s no bouncing up and down the page as in example #2. Here’s a live example to try out and a screenshot of how it looks:

FAQ accordion example

There are a number of good plugins in the WordPress plugin repository that will help you easily create an accordion like this; some may need some CSS styling and others will have more customizations built in. Here are a few that I and my clients have used:

So if you’re using a text-based FAQ or need to make a new FAQ in your site, consider checking out one of the more interactive accordion plugins to give visual interest to your question-and-answer list.