Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

* Updated 4/23/09 *

Well, it’s been about 3 weeks since we announced that Review App is free but as of today we’re pulling the plug on the free downloads. It turns out we’re not really set up to be in the software business…

So far only a handful of people have downloaded Review App and these are the patterns that are emerging:

• Requests are coming from China where we’re afraid our licensing agreement will be ignored
• Non-technical users need too much installation support (we honestly don’t have time)
• Spammers: Review App is pretty powerful and could be used to set up spammy websites with thousands of search engine indexed pages. Obviously we don’t want the software to be used this way.

We may still implement review sites for select clients using the Review App base so if you’re serious about your online review project, go ahead and contact us.

Sometimes you want to make certain listings stand out more than others on category pages and with conditional formatting Review App makes it happen. Just choose the CSS style you’d like to apply to “special” listings, choose the field that will determine “specialness,” and the value that makes a listing special. It’s that easy.

Here’s a practical example. On our camping website we offer campground owners the opportunity to purchase a “sponsored listing” for their business. We created a hidden input/output field called “promotion” and for sponsored campgrounds we set the value of promotion to 1. On the “Category Appearance” page for our campground section we set conditional formatting to use CSS class “highlight1″ for any listing where promotion = 1. You can see the results in the right image above.

Conditional formatting is just one more way Review App helps you monetize you online business. Stay tuned for more BIG news…

After using Review App ourselves for over a year we realized that the available review statuses - pending and active - weren’t enough. If you administer a website you know that sometimes you don’t want something posted online but you also don’t want to delete it forever - and it’s not really “pending” either because you already made a decision about what to do with it. Now Review App allows you to mark any item - a listing, review, or photo - as “inactive.”

So how does this work in practice? Here’s a real world example: On our camping website we’re only set up for campground reviews in the US but every now and then a member tries to submit a Canadian campground. Instead of deleting the campground forever, we mark the listing as “inactive” so it doesn’t appear on the site OR in our pending queue. If, one day, we decide to add a category for Canadian campgrounds we can simply activate the appropriate inactive listings - nothing is lost!

We also enjoy keeping funny (to us anyway) reviews or listings like this one:

how do Igetthere fromdayton,ohio

Seriously, though it’s helpful to keep reviews like this to track usability issues. Perhaps your site is confusing to users and several folks make the same mistake thinking your review form is a contact form, for example.

Inactive listings are super helpful for managing high volume, user-generated content websites - just one more way Review App allows you to rock your online business!

From the beginning we’ve worked hard to keep Review App simple but in some cases we made things a little too simple. For example: in order to make it easy for users to sign up for an account on a Review App site we kept the questions to the bare minimum - email address and user name. Many of you, however, wanted to find out more about new members upon sign up and we support your right to choose (though our own sites still keep it old school).

To add a user data field to your new member sign up form, simply mark “yes” to the question, “Ask on sign up?” and it will be a part of the sign up process. We recommend you keep the fields asked on sign up to a minimum - maybe add short questions like gender and zip code - to keep the new member registrations flowing. Remember, even if you’re offering free accounts no one wants to fill out a long form just to access your site features!

Just wanted to talk about two new features we added to Review App recently:

De-dupe tool

If you run a medium or large size review site you know that from time to time you’ll end up with duplicate user-submitted listings. Sometimes these “dupes” can go undetected for months until you realize you have two listings for the same place, each with its own reviews, photos, etc. What to do?

With the de-dupe tool, just enter the duplicate listing ID and the original listing ID and presto! Review App handles the rest. All the duplicate listing reviews, photos, tags, and list entries will be moved to the original listing and the duplicate listing will become inactive. Sweet, huh? That feature has already saved us countless hours on the sites we manage so we know you’ll appreciate it too.

Improved notifications

With Review App you can choose to be notified via email when new listings, reviews, or photos are added and we’ve given you even more flexibility in setting notification rules. Only want to be notified for guest reviews but not for registered user reviews? No problem. Want to auto-approve registered members’ reviews but moderate guest reviews? Review App makes it easy.

Other stuff

We’re also working on behind-the-scenes stuff that makes Review App easier to upgrade and customize while improving speed as well (although it’s already lightning fast). We’ll keep you updated right here via the blog…

You may have noticed from our previous post about user contribution points & ranking that Review App now supports user avatars. We’re using a system managed by Gravatar.com that allows members to create portable avatars that can be used on sites and software with Gravatar support (like WordPress). The Gravatar tools are really the best we’ve seen for creating and serving avatars and we’re stoked to offer integration through Review App.

If you don’t already have a Gravatar account it’s simple to sign up. Just enter your email address, confirm your account, and upload a hot pic. Your avatar will appear on sites where you use your Gravatar email address to sign up (including Review App sites).

Simple. Like Review App

We just launched a new feature in Review App today that should help motivate members to add more content to your website: User contribution points. Point values are easy to set up and you can change them at any time. Managing similar systems over the years has taught us that listings should generally be worth about 3 points while photos and reviews are worth 2 and 1 points, respectively. Of course those are just guidelines - you can choose to reward contributions based on their relative worth to you!

Once you’ve configured how many points you’d like to reward for various actions you can set up user point levels to make things interesting. Over at Serious Running they’re calling members with no contribution points “couch potatoes” while only those with more than 100 points are “Serious Runners.” Whatever it takes to get your members motivated, right?

With a user point system in place the possibilities for content contests and promotions are endless. In the past we’ve found great success rewarding members who reach a certain level with free t-shirts or stickers but you may want to use this functionality to scout out experts in your field for additional responsibilities.

More cool stuff is coming soon, keep checking back for the latest Review App news!

There haven’t been many updates on the blog recently but rest assured - that’s just because we’re working hard adding new features to Review App! One of the most requested features Review App users have asked for is new content stats and trends and we were happy to oblige!

If you’re a webmaster you already know that when it comes to the web, content is king. With Review App user-generated content is king and it’s important to track how much new content is being added to your site on a monthly or even daily basis. New content stats let you see, at a glance, how many new listings, reviews, and photos have been added to your site in a given time period. Using the form shown on the right you can filter the results by individual sections or view your stats on an annual, monthly, or even daily basis.

In addition to the new content reporting tools we’ve also included a report that shows the number of new members who have signed up in for your site a given time period. This is just one more way for Review App administrators to see how effective their website is at attracting new users and new content.

New content stat reporting is just one of the latest features we’ve added to Review App over the past month. Stay tuned here to see what else we’ve been working on!

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!