Reviews: CRUD #27
Description
This area of the website is to contain reviews of industry related products and services, and should implement the categorisation / tagging system that has been previously mentioned above in both the tutorials and articles section of this specification. This would make it easier for the user to only browse reviews of a certain product or service that they are researching to purchase. Such products / services / categories / tags could include:
- Books (by (programming) language?)
- Software (IDEs, server components (web/mail/database/etc.), project management tools, etc.)
- Hosting or other web-related providers
The things that are being reviewed don't necessarily have to be commercial - It could be an open source piece of software, a free hosting provider, or a free (downloadable) eBook.
Reviews provide three obvious benefits to both the site and community:
- Revenue from applicable products / services with affiliate schemes
- Traffic from people searching for reviews
- Donated review copies can be given away in competitions
Only staff members have the power to author reviews and should have access to the required tools to create, modify and remove content authored by any other member of staff too. When authoring reviews, markdown formatting should be allowed to ensure that the content does not interfere with the branding/style of the rest of the website.
It would be useful if further controls were made available for the publication of "attribute data" in a uniform and consistent fashion. This includes things such as a cover image of the book / software / service as well as publisher, price, and (masked affiliate) URL to purchase the subject of the review. Some form of scoring metric could also be selected, this could purely be an overall x/10 score - Though the option of breaking this down into "categories" or scoring could be explored, though different "categories" would be relevant for each type of product / service reviewed and could cause problematic.
Reviews are a potential source of revenue. Affiliate links can be attributed to the review so that when a visitor clicks through to purchase the item or service, we would earn a percentage of the basket value. This should have no baring on the things that we do review, in that we shouldn't just review products and services that we could potentially earn from - And we should probably style affiliate links differently to standard external links to note that purchasing via this link will help us out.
The main potential source of affiliate revenue would probably be via Amazon links, for book reviews.
Information Displayed
- Date of publication
- Title
- Content
- Cover image
- Product attributes
- Purchase URL
- Scoring
- Author (linked to profile)
- Categorisation(s)
- Tags
- Comments
- Ratings Average & Count
Additional Features
- Comments (Issue Commenting #10)
- Ratings (Issue Ratings #14)
- Pagination (Issue Pagination #13)