Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas. We received about 15-20 great ideas for the site!
The following were suggested, but are already parts of the site:
- Users can rate products - Duh…
- View top ten for each category - You can already sort by rating for each category.
- Be able to vote ratings down if they seem biased/fake - We already have the flagging system in place to remove unacceptable reviews. We could do some sort of “X out of Y members found this review useful”
- More discounts and Manual price match - This is pretty tough considering that we don’t sell anything. I’ll pass this info along to our sponsors.
Here are some of the suggestions and what I am considering doing:
#15: Have “Price Paid” instead of “Value” - Having members share where they bought the product and for how much does help people save on supplements. The only problem is that I would need to also specify what size they bought, shipping, discounts, etc. I am considering creating a separate page for each supplement for people to post the best prices they could find. For now, users can just mention how much they paid and from where in their review.
#14: Allow reviewers to say where they bought the supplement from - Similar to the previous suggestion; I think I will create some sort of separate page for each supplement on the best places to buy it.
#13: Taste option - Have another field (0 through 10 rating) for taste. Supplements in pill form could have an NA. I had considered this when I first built the site, but decided that reviewers could just mention it in their reviews instead of creating a whole extra field.
#12: Create more categories based on fitness goals - The supplements are already categorized like this somewhat. It is hard enough to figure out the correct category for each new supplement already, so it would be even more difficult finding the right goal too. Some supplements do multiple goals at once, such as burning fat and building muscle.
#11: Allow users to create supplement blogs/journals - This would require me to create some sort of username/password type system. It is very possible. Each product page could also have links to any blogs/journals on that supplement. This info could be very useful. The only problem is that it would be very difficult on my part to create such a script. This is a good idea, but I am going to wait a while before making the commitment to developing it.
#10: Allow people to post their names - In theory, this would help establish credibility amongst reviewers, however it would be useless unless you could log in and post using some sort of username. Otherwise, anyone could pretend to be you and add a rating. Again, this will be pretty tough to script, however I would like to implement it sometime down the road.
#9: People who liked this product also liked… - Right now, I don’t know how I would add this feature in because I have no way of knowing with my current data. If I were to do some sort of username system, I could implement this feature pretty easily.
#8: Get more traffic - The site already receives nearly one hundred thousand visitors each month. However, more traffic = more reviews = more useful.
#7: Include product info for each supplement - I have always wanted to include the manufacturer’s description and maybe nutrition info, but it would take so darn long to add it for each of the 1,700 supplements I have in the database right now. I will look into ways of importing this data rather than having to manually enter it for each product.
#6: Remodel the layout - I have had a number of people tell me this throughout the life of the site, and I had several people suggest this as part of the competition. I have tried multiple times to make the site more attractive, but without too much success. The problem is that I am colorblind and everyone has a different opinion on what looks good. Take a look at the progress I have made though: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.thesupplementrating.com
#5: Create a rating value that incorporates number of reviews - I have always wanted to do something like this, but never could decide on an appropriate formula. The idea would be to create a mathematical equation so that a product that has a rating of 9 and 100 reviews gets a better score than a product with a rating of 10 with 1 review. The issue is that it would need to work for all instances. For example, I don’t want a product that has 1000 reviews and an average score of 6 to be better than a product with 3 reviews and an average score of 9. I will eventually be able to figure something out; I assume the formula will just hit me one day.
#4: Show recommendations by age/gender - Right now, I don’t collect a gender value for the reviews, but I should start doing that. I want to create a “More detailed statistics” page for each product, where it shows ratings trends, breakdowns of ratings by gender or age, standard deviations, outliers, etc.
#3: Have featured professional reviews for each product - It would be great to have some featured reviews by reputable fitness experts to help supplement the average Joe user reviews. I could gather a team of a few experts, create a profile for each and have them all review a number of supplements. Obviously I couldn’t do this for all the 1,700+ supplements currently in the database, but it would be great for some of the most popular products.
#2: Show more recent reviews - Before this competition, you could only see the last 3 user reviews from the home page. Since a handful of people suggested allowing visitors to see more, I created a page that lets you see as many recent reviews as you want.
And here is the #1, the winner of the contest!
#1: Create a Question and Answer section - A major problem used to be that users would post questions are reviews. They would give the product arbitrary scores which would totally ruin the validity of the average product scores. I would delete them, but a lot of the time, they would be very good questions. Right after receiving this idea, I went ahead and implemented it. In the few weeks that this feature has been live, there are already 85 questions and 57 answers!
Congratulations Teja A. - you just won yourself a $50 Bodybuilding.com Gift Certificate!
Thanks again to everyone who participated. If anyone else can think of ways to improve, feel free to give us your ideas!
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:09 am
Hey just an idea for how to go about #7, im not sure if it is legal or possible but you could jsut take the info that is already posted on websites like gnc.com. they have just simply scanned the nutition label and posted it on the website so maybe copy and paste? Like I siad I dont know if that would be a copy right issue or not but would save time and make it easier. Just thought I’d throw that out there I know having that on this site to compare one product to another would be helpful and would attract more traffic to the site.