Turn WordPress Into a Review Site Engine: DG-Review-Site Plugin

This morning I was considering selling one of my sites — Award Winning Hosts. It wasn’t earning as much as it did a few years ago, and I could probably get more selling it based on its PageRank, age and past sales than I’d make just letting it sit. But I really can’t let go of this site. Web hosting is too closely related to almost all of my sites to not have an effective method of cross-selling that service, and pre-selling through an intermediate site has always been more effective than directly linking to hosts with affiliate programs. So, I challenged myself to completely rewrite this site in under a day, and in the process, created a nifty WordPress plugin anyone can use to do the same.

If you’re not interested in my commentary and just want to check out the plugin, you’ll find it here: DG Review Site Plugin.

Web hosting affiliate programs have never paid higher commissions than they do now. It exploded two or three years ago as a couple hosts started raising referral payouts on Commission Junction upwards of $60 per sale. Now, the average commission for a $8/month or under shared web hosting plan is over $90. Believe it or not, all 26 hosts listed at Award Winning Hosts run affiliate programs with payouts in this range, with several above $100 per sale.

Unfortunately AWH hasn’t been referring many of those sales. Its traffic dropped off over the years thanks to a lack of updates or any SEO. Hosts moved their programs to different networks or expired old affiliate URLs in favor of new ones I wasn’t keeping up with. I had listed plan features and prices but these change often and were long out of date.

I don’t want to take too much time away from developing W3Counter, especially now that I’m back in classes for the next few months and have a pretty full schedule, so I wanted to limit the work on this site to something I could get done this afternoon.

That’s why I chose to use WordPress as the backend to the site. I’ve really come to appreciate the flexibility and extendibility of it. WordPress could easily organize the hosts into categories, provide search-friendly URLs, and allow lots of customization in the future when I have more time.

I decided to make use of WordPress’s comments system to turn the site into a web host review site - a “web 2.0″ hosting directory you might say - with matching style. Comments could easily become customer reviews, but I wanted to do a little more. I wanted to be able to show the number of positive and negative reviews for each host, as well as collect ratings based on features, support and value for each host. That’ll let me categorize and sort the hosts better once I have some actual reviews in the system.

I looked a bit but couldn’t find a WordPress plugin that would let me do this, so I wrote my own, DG Review Site Plugin. I tried to make it as generic as possible so it can be used to turn WordPress into a review site for anything, not just web hosting. It installs in one click and is configured completely through the options tab of WordPress’s administration area. The documentation on WordPress’s site is pretty good, so it didn’t take too long to figure out how to hook into their system whenever a comment is posted and to add my own subpanel to the administration area.

The design itself consists of only five images — a starburst “award” badge for a logo (which I first learned to create with this tutorial), a background tile that took only a minute to create, and three icons for the ratings from the free Silk set.

The site really consists of only two templates — the index and category pages are the same code — and another template for the individual posts. The plugin I wrote takes care of collecting ratings with each review, displaying them in each review, and providing the averages and counts for each post.

Creating the graphics, editing the templates, writing a plugin from scratch, creating a database table linking each post to an affiliate URL, writing a short description for each host, and finally creating a page to distribute the plugin took a total of about 6 hours. And there’s room for plenty of customization in the future. Now all I need are some actual reviews of these hosts and I’ll be set.