The welovelocal Blog

One of the most exciting things about welovelocal.com is that it gives smaller, potentially lesser known businesses a chance to be compared to their bigger competitors based purely on merit rather than their marketing budget, thanks to the reviews and recommendations of their customers.

At a time when small businesses have never faced so much competition from larger multinationals and PLC’s, we hope that welovelocal.com can play its own small roll in readdressing the balance and fighting the emerging ‘Tescopoly’ of our high streets.

One of the features on welovelocal.com I am most proud of it the way we handle printing business details. It seems like a small ask, but many sites don’t get this right. You end up printing interfaces, adverts, and extra pages, just to get the three lines of information you want -it’s a pain. We wanted to make sure that not only would you only get the useful stuff, but that it would fit neatly on a page.

Try it out, we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The more observant of you may have noticed that the site is now running version 1.0.1 which means we have pushed out a minor release. This new version fixes a few bugs and adds a number of minor improvements to various features on the site. There’s nothing overly new or exciting as it’s only a small release but you may now notice things working better!

These changes include:

• The greeting top right by your username randomly changes to make your visit even more exciting.
• We fixed an annoying bug when you could be logged out after a certain period of time. We have changed the way sessions are handled so you’ll only be logged out if you stay continually browsing for a year. Let us know if this happens to you.
• Paging has been added to your Blackbook for the activity monitor so you don’t end up scrolling down miles.
• We now automatically discover the area your postcode is related to and use that for the location field e.g. Angel or Soho. You can opt out of this to have it display “I’m not telling!” instead from the Account page in your Blackbook.
• Search is now a bit faster when we’re doing a partial match for a business name. For this we have to use a MySQL LIKE wildcard query and they are notoriously difficult to optimise. Other searches (e.g. for a type, or an exact business name) will still be really fast because MySQL can use indexes for those!
• Plus a load of back end tweaks to make our life easier for managing all the data we have on record.

So now we have our first maintenance release out in the open, the next release will be to add some new features which we’re currently hard at work planning out.

As you know welovelocal.com is all about ratings and reviews, we want to find out about the places you love to use and trust. Unsurprisingly, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to rate a business and how to ensure that the ratings you provide present the truest picture of what you thought of that particular business.

Ratings are great, but they need to presented in a meaningful context. We all understand that five stars means that whatever is being reviewed is considered as something good, and one star not so good, however, without understanding how a rating correlates to the experience of the person reviewing can lead to potentially less helpful feedback.

How so? Two main reasons. Firstly, people tend to be predicated towards expressing their opinion at either end of the scale, so if you look at most review websites you’ll to find ratings at each extreme of the scale, they either love something or they hate it (take a look at Amazon the next time you’re buying books and you’ll see what I mean). Nothing ever seems to be so-so.

Secondly, very few websites actually correlate a star rating to any criteria, so one person thinks three stars means ‘good’ and another considers it to mean ‘average’. When we ran some testing earlier this year, without specifying any criteria to each star rating we also found this to be the case too.

With welovelocal.com, we have adopted a subtler approach. When you rate a business, we want you to share how your experience fared in relation to your expectation. Why? Well, the places I love may not be considered so by my mum or even my work colleagues. We all have different tastes, preferences, likes and importantly expectations. By providing a profile and reading your other reviews, locals can get a better idea what you are like and also the type of expectations you’re likely to have when you use a local business or service.

It may seem like a small thing, but we hope it will make it easier for you to trust the reviews submitted by our locals and avoid coming across endless five and one star reviews.

It’s happened a lot quicker than expected, but welovelocal.com has just had it’s first business user request verification, it’s all very exciting.

For those of you who aren’t sure what I am talking about, allow me to fill you in. welovelocal.com allows you to claim control over you business listing, meaning you can respond to the reviews written by your locals, and add unique content to your page. To verify your ownership over a business we send out a letter to the businesses listed postal address.

Clean and Dusted, a carpet cleaning business in Soho, will hopefully be the first of many businesses who register with welovelocal.com and take advantage of the services we offer. You can find out more about our business services here.

Welcome aboard Clean and Dusted, it’s going to a lot of fun.

It seems that as soon as Max put up the post on Gmail blocking our emails the problem just went away.  I’d like to say that it was a technical success, but that would be lying, the fact of the matter is we’re not that sure why it seems to be working all of a sudden.  The fact that we have all been marking the emails as ‘Not Spam’ for the past few days may have had an impact, but that would seem like a rather easy way for spammers to bypass the filter, and we know the Google boys and girls are a lot clever than that!

Chalk this one up to a blessing from the Google gods, it happens from time to time.  We’d still appreciate it if you double checked your spam the next time you get an email from us, and of course if you can shed any light on the issue we’d love to hear from you.

One day in and we are learning that Gmail don’t seem to like our ‘verification emails’ or ‘invite a friend’ messages, as they are consistently going into our Gmail Spam box which is a bit of a pain.

We’ve been doing a lot of testing, but we’re yet to resolve the problem - bizarrely the route of the problem seems to lie in the word ‘local’ within the verification URL.  Having tested lots of variations, this consistently remains the Gmail spam trigger, not suprsisingly ‘love’.  So if you’ve signed up  with Gmail so far and managed to scoop your verification email out of your spam filter - thank you.  We’re aware of the problem and we hope to resolve it soon, thanks for your patience.

We’re live! No Alpha, Beta or Gamma, just the finished product. Hello and welcome to welovelocal.  You may have already guessed it, but just in case - WE LOVE LOCAL.

We believe everyone’s a local expert. We all have a favourite local restaurant, know a friendly shopkeeper, or have used an ultra reliable tradesperson at one time or another. With welovelocal we want to put that local knowledge online by encouraging everyone to review and rate the businesses and services you use everyday.

By sharing our local knowledge, we can help the best local businesses stand out from the crowd, and find the right listing when looking for a business or service.  Of course we don’t all have the same tastes, budgets and levels of expectation, so by reading the profile of the person who submitted the review you can find a little more about them – the aim is to find businesses and services recommended by people just like you.

So now we’re up and running, let’s start spreading the word.  Sign up, tell your friends and family about us, and get let’s get people reviewing. By inviting people to your network of friends, you’ll also be able to keep track of their favourite places and join the welovelocal community.

You may have noticed that we currently only cover London, but don’t worry we’ll be going nationwide very soon.  We want to make sure everything is working fine, before we add more than one million businesses to our directory covering the rest of the UK.

It has taken us longer than we expected to get here, but we hope you’ll be happy with the results.  Please do let us know what you think, give us feedback, as we’ll be taking all your comments and suggestions into consideration as we continue to update and improve the site.