Local Bike Shop Directory Overhaul

About the time I posted that I would be taking a break from my computer, I got a huge flow of creative juices that I have captured and used as midnight oil to burn into the wee hours of the night.

To be honest it started with this email, which got me to thinking about my site and the experience I would like others to have on it. TrailCentral has always been a place where visitors could come and post their feeling about trails and bike shops freely and anonymously. The email I refer to was from a visitor that felt a shop was being unfairly reviewed and felt a need for users to be registered before allowing them to post reviews.

My initial reaction was, "Hell No!" Mostly because I felt that TrailCentral was a small website and part of the charm was that visitors could leave anonymous feedback. Matter of fact, I still do think that, but I must say my initial reaction changed a bit.

When I responded to the email, I stated that I believe visitors of TrailCentral could easily spot poor reviews. To prove this I wanted to implementing a way for users to rank comments.

When I started panning out the details on how to do this I found that my general attitude changed a bit. I did some coding and as a result I came to the conclusion that I would only allow registered users to submit reviews. However, my dilemma was that I wanted them to still feel "safe" by posting anonymously... Hmmm.

The answer was pretty simple. I opted to omit the form to non-registered users and only display the form to review a shop to those who are logged into the system. When submitting a review users are able to change their username and instead use an alias.

This would give a certain degree of credibility to the review since they are only submitted by those registered with TrailCentral, while giving them the sense of anonymity if desired when posting a review. If a review is submitted with an alias, there is no way to backtrack to who submitted this review.

Back to the original reason I started to work on the code in the first place. I wanted to add the ability for visitors to rank reviews based on how useful they are.

I truly feel that those that visit TrailCentral are intelligent individuals that are able to spot bogus reviews. To ensure this, I wanted to add a comment ranking system that wouldn't require a lot of coding while still being powerful. Most importantly it needed to be seamless to the user. Basically, I didn't want to cause a refresh each time a visitor ranked a review because I didn't want the load on the server and I wanted it to be extremely usable. Thankfully, I was able to use AJAX and the result is a kick-ass rating system that works similarly to the rating stars you would find on big sites like NetFlix.

So, once I got that working as I wanted I started looking around the rest of the local bike shop directory, which lead to a waterfall of ideas and motivation to fix things that I've been working around for a long time. Many late nights later and I think the local bike shop directory has been sufficiently overhauled... for now.

If you get a minute, please take the time to visit the Local Bike Shop directory and rank a view reviews, click around the directory, and most importantly let me know what you think. I'm all ears.

Major changes to the Local Bike Shop Directory:

• Visitors or logged in users are able to add bike shops.
• Visitors are no longer able to give a review until they register or sign in.
• Visitors are able to rank any review.
• Google Maps API was updated to include more features on State, County, and City search pages.
• Google Map added to each of the shop pages for better visual representation of the shop location