Structuring my new website
I am currently in Thailand taking a little bit of a break, but also spending some time on my new travel website. I am still thinking exactly what I want to do with the site.
I decided to use Joomla as the CMS for the site. I was thinking about Drupal at first, but after spending a little bit of time with it, I eventually went back to Joomla. I found it difficult to find good themes for Drupal, like what you can get with Joomla. Drupal is probably more flexible and powerful, but Joomla is a little easier to get a site up and running, in my opinion.
I am using a theme from Joomlart. The theme has an online newspaper look. At first, I couldn’t get anything to work. The documentation for it isn’t great, but once you play around with it for a while, it is not too hard. They have a great support forum, who helped me with a couple of small problems I had.
I want to make user reviews a large part of the site, and Joomla has a great review extension, which I think looks very professional and is fairly easy to set up. I would also like to add property listings later on and again Joomla has some good extensions for this.
I wanted to add a blog to the site and could have done it within Joomla, but you just can’t beat wordpress for this. I imported my old travel site entries into the site and redirected the old site to the new domain. I want to also eventually set up a forum on the site and will probably go with Vbulletin. There are bridges available to link users to Joomla, but to keep it all simple, I might just keep them separate.
I am getting a little bit of traffic now to the site and starting to build links. Travel bloggers are a friendly bunch of people and seem to happily exchange links. I am already ranking for “asia travel guide” which at least is a start.
My goal is to eventually be able to hire some writers to produce content for the site, but that could be a while off yet.
Creating your own user generated review site
Eretailers’ review and feedback sections have grown by nearly 25% since 2004. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa data, 58% of consumers prefer websites with peer-written product reviews.
A user generated review website is a great model to build a site on, either as a stand alone site or an addition to an established website. Once the basic framework has been set up – categories and fields, it is just a matter of adding a few items to each category. People visiting the site provide the content by writing reviews. You could even allow them to add new items to grow the site automatically.
You can then either display some ads on the site and/or include an affiliate link for each product to make money. To create a successful review site (like any site really) is to choose a suitable niche. If you choose hotels for example, it would probably be better to select a single country or region.
Some ideas for sites could include:
- digital cameras
- Japanese movies
- sporting goods
- hotels/hostels
- video games
Some people might be thinking that they would need a team of programmers to build a review site, but fortunately there are scripts available that make it possible for anyone to set up their own review site. I just set up Reviews for Joomla today on my Japan Hostels site. I have used it a couple of times before, and it really takes no time to set up.
The new jReviewsEverywhere component enables you to integrate reviews into several popular Joomla components. The hostel site is running HotProperty another component which I like, but hasn’t been updated in a long time.
Reviews for Joomla is only $79.99 and the Everywhere component is an additional $35. I believe that this is a bargain. The component is very powerful and if you compare it to what internet marketers charge for their crappy ebooks, it represents great value. The support forum is very active with the developer providing much of the responses.
By the way, this isn’t a paid review 
I was just impressed by this product that I thought I would share it with everyone.
