FirstSearch Blue

This guide explains what seems like the easiest way to setup a review website. This would be the sort of site where people review products and services that you have listed on your site. We are going describe a way that is flexible enough that the user can setup any of the three common types of review sites:

1. User Review Site – This is the type of site where users can review and rate a set of items (maybe other websites, books, movies, etc) that the webmaster has put on the site. Users do not add new items, they simply review and rate items put on the site by the owner.
2. User Review and User Content Site – This type of site allows user to add new items to the list of items being reviewed and rated.
3. Webmaster Review Site – This is the type of site where the webmaster just lists a few items of their choosing and rates/reviews them based on their opinions (with no input from the user.) This type of site is typically used by affiliate marketers (who are often just trying to drive traffic to the sites of products on which they make a commission…)

So we started this by checking into the Content Management Systems available for building a review based website. They’re really weren’t any. Most useful CMS’s just offer a way for the user to create a review based site by adding plugins to a site that is initially generic.

After deciding that we’d need to use a Review Plugin, we checked out the plugins for the most popular CMS’s. You can build a review site that utilizes a review plugin using: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and several others.

For now, we recommend giving WordPress a try with the GD Star Rating plugin. We’re going to create a site like this over the next couple of days – we’ll let you know how it goes and if we decide to change our approach.