Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Last month we tackled a massive relaunch of tripleblaze.com, an outdoor website focusing on camping and hiking, and we were pleasantly surprised with how well Review App handled the task. With access to powerful backend functions and user-friendly data import tools we had the new site up and running within days without a moment of down time!

The tripleblaze project was particularly ambitious since we weren’t just converting the site to the Review App platform - we were also tackling a graphical redesign at the same time. The designers weren’t given any Review App constraints in terms of the way the forms, listings, or category pages should look which meant none of the stock templates included with Review App would work. Fortunately Review App was up to the challenge and with a little custom programming we brought the design to life. It’s amazing how good design can catapult a site from simply useful to truly engaging.

Of course using the backend Review App functions to create a website’s design involves more effort than using one of our stock templates but we think the results speak for themselves. It’s nice to know that no matter what you envision for your site, Review App can make it happen.

Since tripleblaze.com already contained thousands of registered members and just as many campground and hiking listings we needed to transfer massive amounts of content to the Review App platform. Using the spreadsheet import functions on Review App we moved everything over in just a day and most users didn’t even notice the switch. No data was left behind - even the campground wishlists made the leap!

We’re super stoked about how the tripleblaze project turned out and it gave us another chance to hone and enhance Review App for future projects. Give us a shout and tell us how we can help with your website redesign!

You may have noticed that our regular posting streak was broken a couple weeks ago and things have been quiet here ever since. We ended up taking our own advice about focusing efforts on our other blogs and that’s meant the Review App blog is no longer seeing daily updates. Clearly we were running out of good material as our last post was about Office Max for goodness sake.

We’ll continue to post new stuff here when we have useful information to share. Like today - we’ve been busy improving Review App over the past month and have some cool new features to share. The first is actually a minor change to a Review App plug-in called AdZone.

For those who don’t know AdZone is a lightweight ad server that’s integrated into Review App to allow you to rotate ads, track stats, etc. on your website. Anyway, we noticed that some ad network servers can be slow at times which means your pages will be slow to load, particularly for ads placed near the top of your pages. AdZone now allows you to selectively place ads into iframes so your pages load completely even if an ad loads slowly or fails to load at all. Some ad servers use iframes exclusively and we considered making this the default behavior but it turns out Google Adsense has trouble with iframes since it serves contextual ads (and an iframe page has zero context).

The second feature we added is one we’re really stoked about: default category sort settings (primary and secondary). On the surface this might sound fairly boring but wait - this is pretty sweet. For most webmasters a primary default sort is a no brainer - you generally want your category listings to be sorted alphabetically by title. But what if you have an e-commerce site and you want your products sorted by highest rating to lowest? Just set your primary sort field to rating (descending) and your secondary sort field to product name (alphabetical) and your best products are front and center but still easy to find!

Here’s another way you can use this feature: Say you run a vacation rental website where property owners can purchase ’sponsored listings’ that place their properties at the top of their category page. Just create a hidden numerical field on property listings called ‘promotion’ and for paid listings set ‘promotion’ to anything greater than zero (say 1). Now set your category to first sort by promotion (descending), then by property title (alphabetical). You just created a new revenue stream!

Look for more new Review App features this fall as we deploy our software to even more consumer review sites!