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

[kerron a]

Hi all, I am interested in designing an online business directory for my country. It's a fairly small country so having a local based directory would not be as useful.

The main goal of the website would be to provide listings of businesses in various categories e.g: Hotels, Food, Auto etc. I would like to set it up in a way that if a business owner wants to list his business he can do so without having to contact me directly. Making it a passive manageability option for me. Also i would like to introduce the ability for the business owner to upload photos, videos and a google maps location of their business.

I would also like to add features such as a ratings and reviews so that people who have used the products or services provided by the business listed can share their experiences with other visitors.

I was reading some reviews for wordpress in which people have suggested using this as there are plugins for the features i would like to offer.

I would appreciate any advice on what may be the most suitable direction to get started.

Thanks
Kerron

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[EdwardWhite]

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.

 

[kerron a]

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?

 

[EdwardWhite]

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.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[mtnman]

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.

 

[guido65]

Hello,

I can tell you that Joomla would be the best for this, as there any many review website that are built on Joomla with some custom plugins. Also it is very search engine friendly