Tradesmen - Website recommendations?

davidjwest

I'll do some more work on it and let you know when it's ready, the problem is going to be getting content on there.

plumb1_2

Any cowboy,jack the lad can sign up for these sites,all they are interested in is getting you to pay to be a member.
Word of mouth Recomendation is best,ask you neighbour,freind,aunt Sally etc.
Bett they all say Plumb1

davidjwest

That's it, the site I'm planning wont have any "membership" so to speak.

I've asked friends/faimly but they can't recommend anyone.

davidjwest

I was wondering if anyone would spare about 2 minutes of their time helping me get this off the ground?

I've got a basic version working but need some reviews entering, I'd appreciate it if anyone who's recently had work done could enter the details onto my site.

As soon as I've got a reasonable amount of reviews I can then "go live" with it so to speak.

Tradesmen Review Site

Just go there and click "enter new details" it should be self-explanatory from there, but I am open to comments and criticism.

You can browse to see what other people have written too, but there's no point yet as there's no content!

Thanks!

Rex_Mundi

David

Although this site is full of well meaning. I don't think you've thought out all the pitfalls.

You are asking people to anonymously recommend tradespeople. You have got absolutely no way of checking out whether the details are true or not. Fair enough, you are relying on peoples goodwill to give proper recommendations. But this is the same goodwill that cowboys play on to get people to have work done by them. You could actually end up with a site recommending more cowboys than genuine workmen. If this occurs, people wont only blame the workman for bad work. They will also blame your site for carrying the recommendation.

To show you how easy it is to muck the system up, I went to your site and filled in a report for a gardener. The only thing I didn't mention in the report is, my recommendation is my dog (Cyril Cooper). I fully expect you to delete this entry, and I hope you are not peed off by me doing it, but I'm trying to show you that the system as you have laid it out is WIDE open to false entries. For the sake of a minute or so, any cowboy that comes accross your site can get themselves free advertising with your recommendation. You have no system in place to stop this happening.

Surely at the very least. You need to take contact details of people making entries? This could cut down on a bit of foul play (might put a couple of people off maybe).

davidjwest

Thanks, no it's not annoyed me, I'm glad someone is taking the trouble to help me with feedback etc.

I probably will add a field for the posters email address, maybe even make people sign up to use the service. The main reason I haven't already done so is I need the content, so the less barriers I put up the better. At the moment the only people aware of the site are those on these boards as I've not mentioned it anywhere else and it isn't listed with the search engines etc, so I expect mainly genuine people writing stuff.

I will be putting disclaimers up to advise that the comments are not my own opinions and there is the potential for complete lies to be written, hopefully if the site takes off there would be several comments for each of the tradesmen and that would help to highlight dodgy goings on.

Ultimately there is no infallible system to prevent the cowboys trying it on, word of mouth is the only real way as pointed out by a previous poster but unfortunately word of mouth isn't always a guarantee of getting a good result and not available all the time.

How does this sound for a start? As soon as I start getting anywhere near busy I'll add the registration process which will ask for a valid email address which will send a password out, only then can people login to add reviews (you can read them without registering). I'll also try to check for IP addresses to block multiple reviews for the same tradesman from the same IP, but this is far from ideal for various boring technical and other reasons.

Do you think people would be bothered?

I'm sure one of the reasons other similar sites have failed, or aren't doing very well is that they've overcomplicated it by asking for too much details or they simply aren't user-friendly, or "customer" orientated.

By the way, can your dog do fencing?

Thanks!

dagger_2

try vetted.com it does all that has been previously mentioned and requested :-)