Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
Screenshots Of Updated BuyersVote.com (Plus: your help needed!)
In: Business Ideas| Updates By: Brian Armstrong
6 Jul 2009Following up from my post a few weeks ago, I’ve made some big changes to BuyersVote.com to simplify it and make it easier to use.
Now, instead of adding each page individually with a long list of fields to fill out, it’s possible to add an entire category with lots of pages in just two lines, right from the home page.
Much simpler, right? For example…
You don’t need to have an account to do this (you’ll see a captcha if you don’t have one).
Here’s what it creates: a page for the category (shown below) and a page for each individual item.
From here you can quickly vote items up or down. The 1-10 rankings are now gone – only a simple +1 or -1 for each user is allowed – and the box simply shows the total number of votes that item has gotten. You can also add additional items if you’ve forgotten any (like Excel in the example below if you feel this is a valid option).
Clicking an individual item brings you to it’s page, where you can write a more detailed review (instead of just voting up or down) and eventually see all reviews left by other users.
When you’re all done, it might look something like this.
Now the important part happens: OTHER users can come to site and make their own votes, write their own reviews, and add other items to the category that you may not have known about.
Eventually, you will have a complete and accurate ranking of all personal finance software on the market! (Note: this is just a hypothetical example and those aren’t real reviews being shown.)
Compare this to the way it works now where you do a Google search for “personal finance software” and get nothing but subjective pages trying to sell you something.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that if you do want to create an account (it’s required for voting, to keep it fair) you can still login with just two clicks and you DON’T need to create a new account to use BuyersVote.com! You can use an account your already have (like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc). This uses the very cool OpenID technology.
I’m still finding things I’d like to tweak as I use it myself, and it will continue to evolve, but I’d really like to get YOUR feedback on what you like and what you don’t.
Please do me a favor and click here to try it out! Create a new category if you’ve got a second. I’d love to get your feedback in the comments below, and see how to make it better!
Until next time, keep breaking free,
Brian Armstrong
- BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: BuyersVote.com
- New Rating System For BuyersVote.com
- How To Make BuyersVote.com Easier To Use (With Pictures)
- Screenshots Of Updated BuyersVote.com (Plus: your help needed!)
- Interview I Did For BuyersVote.com
18 Responses
Leave A Comment
About this blog
Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
Most Popular Posts
- 46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money
- How To Stop Letting Little Things In Life Piss You Off
- How To Understand (and Create) A Personal Financial Statement Each Month In 5 Minutes
- Early Adopters: 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website
- From New Idea To Business Launch In One Month (with pictures)
- How I Learned To Live With DSPS
- Entrepreneur/Hacker Meetup In Buenos Aires
- A Few Entrepreneurs You Should Be Listening To Today
- Making Progress...
- Why Directory Sites Are Doing Well As A Business Model
Brian on Twitter...
- Mathew Stark: heh...i was actually searching for a post on how to get back at my sister for being...well to put it [...]
- Julie: I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago, and I, too, was taken by it. Over the years, though, I've come [...]
- Julie: How old? ... Check out www.BizKids.com ... they put us all to shame, no matter how young we are! :) [...]
- Keisha: Also mention this post and you'll receive 10% off your order :) [...]
- Keisha: I just started my business with very little money. It's nothing new however it is bringing me some p [...]
- Three Awesome Books I Read Recently
- Reader Question: I Would Like Some Feedback On A Business Idea…
- Behind The Scenes Numbers From UniversityTutor.com (Revenue & Expenses)
- I’m Moving To The San Francisco Bay Area!
- Get Your Website To #1 In Google With Seoaholic.com
- How To Start Your Own Country
- My Business Will Take Off This Year, If ONLY…
- New Features On BuyersVote (Plus A Few Announcements)
- Early Adopters: 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website
- The Most AWESOME Interview I’ve Ever Done – With Captain Australia
John Bardos
July 6th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
This looks good!
You are definitely going to need nested categories so that different topics can be grouped. For example, Technology, Restaurants, Travel, Lifestyle, etc. Then have users add subcategories in those categories.
Brian Armstrong
July 6th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Hey John! Thanks for the feedback on the categories…I’ve seen sites take a few approaches to this. There is the ‘yahoo’ method where they try to categorize topics by hand, then there is the free for all method where you say screw categories and just let people create whatever (sometimes with tags instead of categories) and use search to sort through it all. Generally if you have a large amount of diverse data search works better, with less data categories work better. Personally, I don’t see a huge advantage to hierarchical categories…it takes a lot of complexity and debate to build it, but it comes down to how often people will ‘browse’ instead of searching. If they will predominantly use search, there is less reason for categories. Anyway, this was my thought process on it, but I could be wrong. Curious to hear other thoughts as well.
matt
July 6th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
I like the new system! Much more intuitive. My only criticism are two display problems, which you may already be aware of.
First, the “Create A New Category” button at the top of all the pages is cut off so it says “Creat A New Cate”.
Second, when I’m on a cagetory page, such as the “Personal Finance Websites” example used above, the text box to add additional categories is only two characters wide, unlike as it is shown in the image above. This makes typing out the category a
These problems are probably because I’m using IE 6.0 to view it, but I thought you’d like to know anyways.
matt
July 6th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Oops–I meant to say in the 3rd paragraph that the small text box for entering a new ITEM makes typing out the item difficult. Sorry.
Gordie Rogers
July 7th, 2009 at 3:39 am
IE6 is shit now. It causes my blog display to screw up, too. Less and less people are using IE6, thankfully. Now, when I design sites I only check the big 5. IE7, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari. I will also have to start checking IE8 soon when I feel more people have moved on.
Buyers vote looks fine in the other browsers, but there is a slight problem in IE7 where the text gets automatically enlarged and cuts off like you said. It’s Internet Explorer 6 and 7 which give web designers headaches when their sites look fine in all the other browsers.
Overall, BuyersVote is much simpler to use now. It’s a great idea. Let’s hope it reaches critical mass soon.
Brian Armstrong
July 7th, 2009 at 3:56 am
Yup agreed Gordie…I’m going to submit it to some popular sites, maybe do a press release, see if I can get some press for it! :)
Brian Armstrong
July 7th, 2009 at 3:45 am
Oh wow thanks for letting me know! I always forget to test it in internet explorer…yep it was an IE bug. I just spent a few hours fixing things, and it looks much better now. There were a whole bunch of things not displaying correctly. Let me know if you see any more!
Gordie Rogers
July 7th, 2009 at 4:01 am
When you do a press release let me know and I’ll do a write up about BuyersVote on my blog. I always need new topics.
Brian Armstrong
July 7th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Awesome! will do Gordie
Hubtonomy
July 7th, 2009 at 9:47 am
I haven’t used IE in a long time so I guess I miss many of these bugs.
Brian Armstrong
July 8th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Yep…amazing there are still people out there using IE6, half the pages on the web must look wrong and they probably never even know it.
matt
July 8th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Its the only approved browser at my work, and yes it sucks big time. Trust me, I don’t use it at home :)
College Town Menus (CTM)
July 7th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Wow great work, Brian! Things are coming along nice and smooth! You are pretty well versed in programming! I like how you make it easy to add everything and the openID login is sick. I’m excited to see how things develop. Your blog posting frequency is down since you’ve moved. How about some traffic posts for this new site and ways your using to track it?
Brian Armstrong
July 8th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Thanks! Traffic on BuyersVote is nothing so far, I’m basically just doing it as a beta test to people on this blog. Only thing worth mentioning is notice how I did a little bit of SEO on the auto-generated pages? For example:
http://buyersvote.com/items/iphone-reviews
The title tag, h1 tag, and url all say “iphone reviews”. I automatically appended the “reviews” keyword word here to all the pages to try and target this phrase in search engines. Google hasn’t picked up these changes yet, but long term I’m hoping this will be a major source of new traffic (along with word of mouth).
Aaron
July 8th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Brian –
Just added a few items on Buyers Vote, and wanted to give you some feedback.
1) It is really intuitive. I was able to browse categories until I found one I was interested in, added a few items, and voted them up.
2) It’s always a struggle to determine whether to categorize them or not, but maybe there is a way the users can help you do it, if nothing else by linking categories or products. For example, I wanted to add details about my smart phone, but had to choose between “Nokia phones”, “Blackberry Phones” and “Cell Phones”. If there was a way to associate a product to more than 1 category that would help.
3) You may want to provide some more information on OpenID and the ability to login with an existing account, as some people will be a little wary to do so, as they’re not sure what gets transmitted, i.e. their password, etc. (I know it doesn’t but it would probably help to include that information until OpenID really goes mainstream.) Out of curiosity, what percentage of your users so far use it?
4) I like the reputation concept, and think that will really help as the site gains popularity.
What is your anticipated revenue strategy (if you have one) once you hit critical mass? Just advertising, or do you have another idea such as an affiliate program or other revenue based on the potential referral benefits of the site?
Keep it up,
Aaron
Brian Armstrong
July 8th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Hey Aaron, thanks for the feedback!
I keep debating in my head this concept of an item belonging to multiple categories. I was actually doing this in the first release of BuyersVote and it unfortunately made the user experience a bit too complicated so I dropped it here. If I can think of a way to bring it back and have it still be simple and easy, I’m open to it. One way it could work is to keep the UI identical to how it is now, but when someone adds a new item it would check if that exact item title already existed and use it if it did. This by itself wouldn’t remove all dupes since there will obviously be variations in titles…there would have to be some sort of way to combine items down the road (probably an administrator privilege for users with enough rep).
Great point on people being wary of OpenID, I’ll add a link with more info on that. And yep, only monetization idea for it down the line would be ads or some sort of affiliate thing. Thanks again!
Aaron
July 11th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
No problem, glad I could help. I agree, users with a certain level of reputation could combine/link categories, a lot like a moderator in forums. You may also spend some time looking at Wikipedia (with BV in mind) to see how they are able to link all the articles together, which may be easier than trying to find a category for everything. Another option would be to add tagging to the posts.
Have you had any luck getting additional publicity or heard back from Timothy Ferriss?
Let me know if you have any other concepts you want to test out and I’d be glad to give it a shot.
– Aaron
Brian Armstrong
July 14th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Haven’t heard back from Tim Ferriss, sent out some submissions to news organizations, I don’t think it has enough traffic yet to be news worthy. I’ll keep workon on it over time, we’ll see :) Maybe do a press release.