Today I was properly introduced to LouderVoice – a website for reading and writing reviews on just about anything. I’ve seen a couple of LouderVoice reviews popping up around the place, and I can see why so many Irish bloggers have chosen to use the site. The site was launched a few months ago, so perhaps I’m a bit late with this feedback – forgive me if its all been done before.
Firstly the positive stuff:
- Great logo
- Lovely colours
- Nice, clean design.
- The site is fast and easy to use.
- TinyMCE?
Now the nitpicking:
ALLCAPS
On the top right hand corner of the page, it says “Welcome James Galvin”. That would be fine, but for the fact that this is rendered by the CSS as “WELCOME JAMES GALVIN”. Loudervoice, why are you shouting? What did I do to deserve this??? All caps are bad, especially when it’s my name – I’m sure there are plenty of web psychologists who can give you the reasons.
Navigation
We have a list of the top seven Loud Reviewers and another list of the top Loud Reviews. What would it take to add a little ‘more’ button down the bottom so that I could peruse the top 25 if I felt like it? Perhaps I’m just old fashioned, but I refuse to resort to tag clouds for navigation. And the search box is no good if I’m just browsing. In my opinion, you need pages and pages of lists. I would browse through review titles all day long. The first time I accessed this site, I went straight for the non-existent ‘more’ button under the Loud Reviewers so that I could browse and find people that I know and read their reviews.
Profile
Profile could be better. These days the web is all about vanity. People want to you to know what’s on the mp3 player, via Last.fm. They tell the world what they’re reading at the moment, through Shelfari and Library Thing. They detail their every move on Twitter and Facebook. More than anything else, people like to write about themselves, and they love filling out profiles. They like a big juicy avatar and they like their buddy list too. I don’t know if the buddy list is necessary, perhaps it would just amount to bloat, but the profile picture is a must. Even newspapers have a little picture of the author on top of the column.
A Louder Voice?
My review of Peel was not added to the main page of any aggregator, like irishblogs.ie, which would normally give me a few readers. It is buried in a website without a weak navigation structure, most likely never to be seen again. How can you make my reviews more visible?
Drafts!
There is one glaring absence – the inability to save a review as a draft. Surely every Wordpress user queues their posts, leaves some of them half written, and likes to double-check before blitzing hundreds of subscribers. At the very least, the lack of a ‘preview’ feature is unforgivable – for all the fancy JavaScript, they could at least give us a lightbox with standard HTML formatting. But all is forgiven when I click on the stars rating. Whoever is responsible for those lovely 30px stars deserves a pat on the back.
In summary
Despite a couple of minor shortcomings, which I’m sure will be fixed in a future version, LouderVoice is a pleasure to use. I look forward to when it has thousands of users, and I’m sure it will be the place to go if you want to get the verdict on some restaurant/movie/book. I’ll dock two stars because there’s a typo in the readme for the Wordpress plugin, but I’ll give one back because the site is made by a Cork company.
3 Comments
Hey James, this is wonderful feedback, we really appreciate it. We’ll be doing an update in a few weeks which is focused on some other issues and then the update after that should address almost all of your concerns.
We are being crawled constantly and accurately by all the major search engines and LouderVoice reviews are starting to bubble to the top for certain search terms. In fact a good chunk of our traffic is coming from Google and we are now getting reports from LouderVoice bloggers that their stats are showing measurable traffic from us (which was always the point of the site).
Interesting point about Irishblogs.ie. We assumed most irish bloggers would be signed up already so a double ping would be a waste. If we did direct content to IrishBlogs, we’d obviously have to do it only on the basis of Bloggers who set their Country info to Ireland.
Thanks again.
Hey Conor,
No problem… it was genuinely nice to use LouderVoice. Regarding Irishblogs.ie, I wasn’t suggesting that LouderVoice ping it, I was just highlighting an example of how a mention on the front page of a big site brings me traffic, while a link buried under a tag cloud would not be so prominent. It is good that people are seeing referrals, but I have a feeling that this will benefit bloggers with a low page rank more than it will for me. I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of SEO, but t the moment, the front page of LouderVoice has a PageRank of 6, while the front page of jamesgalvin.com has a PageRank of 5. The difference will be that my review of ‘Peel’ is on the front page of my site, but it’s only on a lesser sub-page of the LouderVoice site, and thus not as prominent.
I’m just thinking out loud really, and when it gets to the stage that lots of people come straight to loudervoice.com for reviews, then the benefits will be clearer. At the moment I use http://www.metacritic.com/ as my review site, but they don’t have reviews about restaurants or museums or plays, etc., and it is too professional (lacking the common man/blogger factor), which leads to less variety in the reviews.
Well done so far, and good luck with the rest of it. By the way, what did you think of TurboGears?
You are spot-on regarding pagerank. Our core target market for reviewers are all those who write great stuff but have low page rank. We don’t expect Scoble to be using us any time soon
I didn’t do the development but I keep a close eye on TG. The current big changes are scaring a lot of people but we’ve been happy with the decision to use it. Once TG2 stabilises later in the year or early next year, we’ll look at that. Right now TG 1.0.x + SA is doing the job for us.
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