Craigslist Clone
Launched in 1995 as a website featuring local events in San Francisco, Craigslist has expanded into a major classifieds portal in the United States and now operates in 70 countries. Craigslist covers virtually all of classified categories ranging from job ads and services to sale of real estate, cars and a multitude of other items. Although Craigslist doesn’t boast fancy design and offers rather simplified navigation, it is still immensely popular with users around the world.
It is common practice among webmasters to launch their sites based on popular clone scripts, rather than work out their own concepts and start from scratch. While we support our customers’ intentions to launch their sites based on classifieds clones, it is essential that you should not create a spitting image of the site you wish to clone, rather take the best from it while maintaining your own individuality.
This is exactly what we try to do when creating clone scripts; we reproduce the most interesting and wanted modules and functions from popular sites and marketplaces combining them with Flynax functionality.
Having released several clones of classified sites and real estate marketplaces, we kept getting multiple requests to make a Craigslist clone. The Craigslist clone we offer is delivered as part of the all-in-one classifieds script and craigslist template. Let us go over the Craigslist clone that we’re offering you and see in which ways it is similar to Craigslist, and ways in which it is different so that you could still have a sense of individuality.
Multiple Classifieds Types
Craigslist’s recipe for success in retaining a huge audience is that it is not narrowed down to a particular classifieds niche. Instead it encompasses all of the possible classifieds categories that you can think of. Craigslist is a place for users to find a new place to live, look through multiple job postings, sell or buy a musical instrument, a car, a used couch or any other item you have in mind.
Similarly, our Craigslist clone allows you to launch a classified ads site encompassing a variety of ad types. Just like Craigslist, our clone will allow your users to easily post ads relating to a multitude of categories.
By allowing your users to post ads to different categories, you’ll be able to appeal to different users with various classifieds preferences.
Design
As you may have noticed, Craigslist is not an epitome of a nicely-designed site in line with current design trends. Craigslist’s template features various links relating to different categories densely located on the white background with no header or footer menu to streamline user navigation.
Since Craigslist was designed far back in 1996, it no longer complies with the latest design trends. We may understand unwillingness of the Craigslist owners to change the design and bring it in line with today’s trends: Craigslist is a successful project with its own long-standing history and, over the years, users have got used to seeing it as it is. That may be one of the reasons why Craigslist hasn’t updated the design since the mid-90s.
When we tasked ourselves with creating a Craigslist clone, we simply could not mirror the Craigslist design template completely and offer users a design that doesn’t comply with current design standards. That is why we took what users are used to from Craigslist and re-created the template from scratch offering a touch of our interpretation in line with current web development trends.
We have slightly repositioned several elements and made navigation better for users. Our template is also a responsive one which makes it look perfect both on desktop computers and mobile devices.
Let us take a closer look at Craigslist template and its pages and see how our Craigslist clone recreates them.
Home Page
Craigslist Home Page is rather simple. It is a sidebar consisting of the main menu, keyword search, useful links and tags, and events calendar. The section of the main content features location choice for a user and a variety of different categories.
The Craigslist clone we offer features a main menu in the sidebar and different boxes, such as:
- Google AdSense;
- Loan mortgage calculator;
- Price history;
and a range of others which you may enable to be displayed from the admin panel.
The content is nominally divided into a header, content and footer. The header features a search by keywords with an ability to filter by categories, user bar, cart and choice of currency. The content also displays a choice of user location and various categories while footer is a nice place where you may place Copyright and Privacy Policy links as well as links to Social Media.
If you compare the Craigslist home page with the one in our Craigslist clone, you will see that our clone not only recreates it but also offers a range of useful features and design improvements to bring better user experience.
Search on the Maps
Although Craigslist users cannot search on the Maps we decided to add this feature to strengthen our Craigslist clone functionality and allow users to see and search for ads on the Maps based on user location. Furthermore, users may filter the search results by using a refine form.
Search Results Page or Category Listings
This page mirrors Craigslist’s functionality. The sidebar features filter sets allowing users to filter listings. The content displays a grid of listings and you are given three options to display them as:
- Grid view;
- List view; and
- Ads on the Maps.
Each listing has an original layout with a price highlighted for better readability and other options enhancing user navigation, such as add to Favorites or a comparison table. Listing filtering and page numbering is also available in our Craigslist clone template.
Listing Details Page
We have placed the content on this page because we thought it is convenient both for users and for the layout as our template is responsive unlike Craigslist. The sidebar on our template features a box with similar ads and other boxes which the Administrator may also add if necessary. The left side of the content features the following elements:
- A picture gallery;
- Listing details;
- A map;
- Mortgage calculator,
- Price history;
- Comments and content from other Plugins.
The right side of the content features boxes with seller information, shopping cart and bidding details as well as a box with static data from other various Plugins.
Revenue and Income
Most webmasters launch their sites knowing that one day they’ll become a steady source of income. Let us explore the ways in which Craigslist generates its income and then look at the tools our clone gives you in terms of monetizing your site.
First of all, Craigslist does not sell its ad space and you will never see a single banner ad on the site. The income comes from charging users for posting their ads. For instance, a user is charged around $25 for a job posting in Boston, New York or Seattle while the fee in San Francisco is $75; the average fee for adding an apartment listing is around $10. Aside from job postings and apartment listings, Craigslist charges users for adding car ads, therapeutic services and ticket sales. With millions of listings added daily, we may safely assume that craigslist revenue may easily add up to millions of dollars yearly.
The Craigslist clone that we offer you almost mirrors Craigslist functionality and allows you to charge users for posting ads. Added to that, our clone allows you to create different listing packages, such as bronze, gold, silver or any name that you decide to assign to a package. You may further fine-tune a package and make it single or multi-listing, decide how many pictures or videos a user can add to a listing within a certain package and more.
Having been in the classifieds market for many years, we may proudly state that our Craigslist clone is much more than a template; it is a fully-fledged classifieds site that you can further enhance by a great number of Plugins developed by Flynax. Craigslist is the third site we have cloned, among other classifieds clones we have made for our users. With our expertise, we are certain that our solution is an excellent tool to help you create your site based on a Craigslist clone.