Thread: What is the best platform for a review and ratings style website?

The models I like is Groupon or a angies list model. Lets begin with Groupon

The idea is you go around to local businesses, and ask them to create a deal if a certain amount of people were to go to that business(creating a lead for them) and its win-win for the customers, since they get a great deal and business get foot traffic or leads. You cannot make this model work passively at first, since you have to spend hours talking to potential clients to advertise, and building trust with people visiting your site.

The other model is Angie's List, where you get customers to pay a fee, and then they comment on the businesses services they use. You make money as a membership fee. Reviewers would have to be verified, so it wouldn't be spam.
I think that model is limited, because you have to join the site, in order to gain some information about places, and really thats only good for you if you want a plumber or something, but not if your visiting as a tourist and you want to know about the best places to eat at, that are off the beaten path.

Wordpress wouldn't be good for this, it would be more like a drupal or custom, I would imagine, to create the huge backend (don't let that stop you thou!)

I'm kind of a person who believes in creating 1.0 models and scaling up, thou, you could do a blog, about local businesses and their offers, using the comment section to have more of a review conversation. You could feature 2-3 businesses a day, and hire a couple of ghostwriter to cover this. See if you get a interest, scale up from there, and you will know what exactly how to do it, because you will learn.

Thanks for the great tips... I haven't looked at it from a groupon perspective. It was a bit different from what I was thinking, but I like the idea of being able to offer visitors discounted deals at local businesses. I'm sure most places would welcome the exposure and customers also.

Any idea what the cost of setting up a system like that may amount too?

Not a clue.

I haven't oursourced anything yet. I just used free tools and mostly paid for my domain name, mailing list, and hosting. That less than 200 dollars or so for a year. A lot of the graphic design is also done by me.

Means I'm wasting a lot of time, but I enjoy the learning process, so I know what it takes behind the scene. Someone else could answer that question better than I can.

Custom would be your best bet for that.

Wordpress like you mentioned will get you started (quite well IMO) but when you get more advanced the functionality/integration UI will be limited for a database of users.