How to make a blog style review site?

[patent10021]

I live in Japan and have an idea for a blog style review site that I think would be popular here.

There are lots of WordPress templates to choose from but I'm not that technically savvy and don't know how I would add special features like star ratings and geographic location settings and/or selectable geographical location options etc. I'm also not sure if it should have an accompanying app. Maybe a nice site is good enough when viewed on smart phones.

If I use restaurants as an example I would need options such as:

A way to express ratings:star ratings
Geographic location settings
Type:cafe, restaurant, hang-out, luncheon spot, dating spots
Available services:WiFi, party reservations
Photo uploads (+ option to review other customer reviews:helpful or not)
plus many other options


Are there companies that specialize in developing these kind of sites? Am I better off finding a template and doing it myself?

Thanks

 

[Tholian]

Are you committed to Wordpress? If your site is going to be driven by "Extras" (things that are not in a plain vanilla blog) you might want to spend some time looking at the plug-ins available in Joomla and Druple. They are both a little more complicated to learn, but it sounds like they may have more of what you want. Although I like Wordpress a lot, one weakness it seems to me is the quality and availability of plug-ins v. other CMS. Just my opinion.

Good Luck with your site!

 

[jsm4182]

Deciding wether to do this yourself or hire a company depends on how serious you are about this site. If this is just more for fun, play around with Wordpress until you can get it to work kinda like what you want. If this is something you want to turn into a serious website then you should hire a company that will do it right.

If I was building a site like this I would use Drupal, it has a much steeper learning curve, but like Tholian mentioned it is more expandable than Wordpress, would be much better at executing those features you listed.

 

[patent10021]

Are you committed to Wordpress? If your site is going to be driven by "Extras" (things that are not in a plain vanilla blog) you might want to spend some time looking at the plug-ins available in Joomla and Druple. They are both a little more complicated to learn, but it sounds like they may have more of what you want. Although I like Wordpress a lot, one weakness it seems to me is the quality and availability of plug-ins v. other CMS. Just my opinion.

Good Luck with your site!

Deciding wether to do this yourself or hire a company depends on how serious you are about this site. If this is just more for fun, play around with Wordpress until you can get it to work kinda like what you want. If this is something you want to turn into a serious website then you should hire a company that will do it right.

If I was building a site like this I would use Drupal, it has a much steeper learning curve, but like Tholian mentioned it is more expandable than Wordpress, would be much better at executing those features you listed.

Well it's a serious endeavor but there are limitations from the start so I'd like to do it myself until it takes off. I'm thinking WP right now because there are plugins and I wouldn't need to do any coding. Could I find a lot of templates/plugins with Drupal/Joomla?

Btw, this kind of blog is called affiliate review blogging no? Even though I won't particularly have any affiliates at the beginning, this is what the category falls under because of the functions, the way it's set up and potential for affiliate marketing right?

Thanks

 

[musty345]

My site's a review blog site and I use RapidWeaver, a links to my site's in the signature.

Couldn't you just use tags for all of them things? E.g. you could have a tag for Wi-Fi and then people can see it before they click the review and they can sort all sites that have the tag Wi-Fi.

It's not ideal, but rapidweaver isnt that hard to use. Even iWeb could do it! I don't have any experience with wordpress sites so I cant comment.

 

[jsm4182]

Well it's a serious endeavor but there are limitations from the start so I'd like to do it myself until it takes off. I'm thinking WP right now because there are plugins and I wouldn't need to do any coding. Could I find a lot of templates/plugins with Drupal/Joomla?

If you are going to start on your own then bring in a developer later on I would just suggest using whatever type of CMS you are most comfortable with setting up. As long as all the posts you create now are stored in some type of database, they can be ported over to whatever system you are using later on.

Drupal and Joomla do both have lots of plugins and templates, though the terminology is just a little different(Drupal calls them modules instead of plugins). Like I mentioned before, Drupal has a steeper learning curve but is much more powerful/expandable.