Creating a successful review site can be a lucrative business yet can be daunting for those who are not familiar with building a site. One of the best ways to build a review site especially for newbies is through WordPress. Not only does it have user friendly architecture but it is also widespread with thousands of Internet marketers and affiliate companies. In fact, building a review site in WordPress is a great marketing tool for business and it is extremely easy to set up.
Templates
The first strategy in building a review site is deciding on a template. WordPress has over 15,000 themes to choose from all for free. As well, there are many designer templates available at a reasonable cost. Choose a theme that is similar to your page content. A travel review site should have a travel related template. When you decide which theme to use then all that is required is installation and then activation.
Once a theme is downloaded there are other changes that can be made such as a different picture or the color theme. Only the design is changed while the structure such as text stays intact. The designing possibilities are endless.
Widgets
Widgets are a great tool for not only the beginner but for the experienced. They allow a user to drag and drop items to the desired location on the page such as a calendar, menu or a banner. Likewise, while using the widgets all text or images remain unaltered.
Plugins
Plugins are important software components on a web page. They support new features and allow customized functions. Examples of plugins for a review site would be Google Sitemaps, star ratings, Share Buttons so people can bookmark your page or refer the page to a social network, Google Analytics to keep track of page views, monitoring for sales, a Contact Form that supports email and various other plugins. There are also plugin tutorials that are quite informative.
Rich Snippet Tools for Hosted Website Optimization
A snippet in a Google search engine is a summary about a web page. Rich snippets deliver suitable samples of text about the search result. Rich snippets allow additional information to be displayed in the search result such as ratings or events with contact information. Rich snippets are a great tool for promoting traffic to a site and inviting potential customers.
Community Submission
The Community Submitted News plugin allows users to submit articles or posts to a site. This is a wonderful tool to generate traffic. As well, it not only increases traffic flow but it keeps the user on the site. Articles and posts are not submitted unless they are approved by the website administer. Likewise, submissions can be edited, deleted and separated into categories.
Content Aggregators
Aggregators utilize various plugins for specific information that comes from multiple online sources. Furthermore, aggregators collect, combine and accumulate data from numerous sources so that users have access to the information. There are many types of content aggregators like reviews, shopping comparison sites, social networks, price comparisons and news.
The benefits of content aggregators for a review or shopping comparison site include attracting more users, easier search for users, expand options for consumers, and allow users to specify the information they need, provides patterns and purchase behavior statistics for the website administrator and streamlines content. Some of the aggregators available on WordPress include Syndicate Press for RSS and RDF feeds directly in your posts and pages, RSS Feeder creates custom feeds that are tracked for Google Analytics and WP RSS Aggregator merges all feeds together and sorts them by date so they can be analyzed.
Summary
WordPress is the ideal solution for the entrepreneur and beginner that want a simplified method for creating a review, shopping comparison site or other type of web site. It is highly customizable, easy to use, includes various tutorials and delivers countless plugins, widgets and interfaces to fit your needs.