Although i’ve delayed the launch of itisdown.com (i’ll probably launch it on monday now), here’s a bit more info on what it is, what it looks like and how it’s put together…
Easy Access
One of the biggest obstacles to getting feedback or even just getting people to talk about something laziness. Take those ‘how was your stay’ forms in hotel rooms. Sometimes i’ll fill them out if i’m bored or because i genuinely like the hotel. Most of the time i don’t bother.
If someone comes up to me on the street and asks about a survey – not gonna happen. Same on the phone. Personal one on one feedback is not proper feedback. Most of the time it’s going to be filtered, biased or toned down. That’s because it’s just less hassle and time to ‘ok’ something rather than criticise it, because if you criticise something, you need to back it up with reasons and explanations, plus you risk making enemies. That’s all way too much hassle and work.
With that in mind, i’m allowing users to ‘login’ via social networks using a plugin from rpxnow.com. Once logged in, these users are effectively ‘members’ and have the same rights as a typical wordpress author would (they can submit posts).
Front End Controls
The problem with wordpress is that in order to add content, you need to be in the backend which is very intimidating for average users. With the p2 theme, users can post articles from the frontpage – eliminating the need to use that intimidating back end. Once a user logs in, they’re directed to the wordpress administration panel but i’ve change that slightly so that they’re redirected to the homepage and bypass the administration panel. It all results in a better user experience.
Voting
All democracies have voting systems in place. So on this site everyone can thumbs up or down a ‘problem’ (which is a wordpress post). They can also comment on problems and thumbs up or down comments too. A bit like digg i suppose in that sense.
Rewarding popularity
All blogs need a popular posts section in my opinion. Any website does really. It makes sense that popular content is brought to the front. Websites aren’t grocery stores – if popular content is buried away in a corner, people will just leave – simple as that.
So the site has a ‘hot topics’ list and i’ll probably add more features along these lines too in the future (highest rated comments etc…).
Facebook & Twitter
I have facebook and twitter logins. I also have a facebook fan box on the site and i must add a twitter follow feature too. The facebook fan page grabs all the latest submissions from the site and displays them on facebook via RSS feeds. Likewise with the twitter account. It means that people don’t need to come to the site to see what’s happening, they can see it through facebook or twitter updates. Again, it’s all about ‘less hassle’.
SEO
This wouldn’t be a website i could put my name to unless it was well SEO’d. This site is an experiment in many things and SEO is one of them. We all know wordpress is king in search engines… so provided the site gets a bit of use, i’d imagine it can go places. How far can it go? I wouldn’t rule anything out…
