The product pages have been updated again this weekend to include more info and community features allowing you to research even more detail from one central point. Some of the features have been worked in over the last month and today I finished another feature – User Submitted Links. You’ll see it on the top-right of each product page. This will help other people get the word out on new product-related content. Feel free to submit your own product-specific website, blog, news tip, a review link or how-to, details of a special offer, a reseller page, a link to an accessory or anything else you think that the owners and potential owners would benefit from. We’ll get a notification as soon as you submit the link and will check it out as soon as we can. If it’s a good one, we’ll add it to the database and it will appear on the product page, on partner sites JKKMobile and Liliputing and in the river of links. (RSS)
Other features that have been added to increase community participation, usability and content:
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Product comments. Each product page now has a comments section at the bottom where you can quickly and easily enter your observations, thoughts and owner feedback for others to benefit from. You may put questions in here but in general, questions get answered in more depth if put into the forums. The comments are hosted by Disqus and include RSS feeds that you can subscribe to on Disqus’ UMPCPortal page.
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Related products. Up to 10 related products are shown in order of popularity. Products are chosen based on the form factor and screen size. Information on weight is also shown. Simply click the images to learn about popular related products.
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News and related links. This has been expanded to ten items and includes an RSS feed where you can track the latest links as they are entered into the database. This is where the user submitted links are also shown.
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Latest Forum posts. We’ve broken out sub-forums on UMPCPortal for some of the devices and if that;s the case, the product page will show the latest forum posts. An RSS feed is available for each forum.
- Trends. I’ve added a trending graph which shows the products relative popularity (calculated and compared with the most popular product on each day.) Its interesting to see how a devices popularity levels out after the initial news buzz.
With over 100,000 people visiting information on the 200+ plus products every month I think we’re reaching a point where community input can really help to build up quality information very quickly which will help people make buying decisions, solve their problems and answer their questions. Its amazing to think that when the list started about 2.5 years ago, it was literally just a list of 18 device names!
I’m always adding to my (HUGE) to-do list and am happy to have external input on features you might want to see on the product pages. One of the things I’ll work on soon is an email update feature where you will be emailed details as they change on each page. The second feature is ‘tags.’ You’ll be able to tag devices with keywords and eventually it will allow you to group and search for special features. Talking about search, this is another thing I want to improve so that you can, for example, find all devices with HSDPA easily. For the time being though enjoy the new features and please, let me know if you find any bugs!
Not really a bug, more a couple of thoughts about things that bug me.
1) Whether I press comments, or full article and comments I go to the same place. Is there a plan to lead to different places? Is the first meant to take me to the top of the comment part, but if the article is shorter than a page then it is the same thing?
2) You need to highlight more who wrote which article. I know it says chippy or ben at the top of the article, but it isn’t really obvious, so people write chippy and ask a question to you when ben or kornel wrote the article and you might even be on holiday or whatever.
Meant to say, I like the improvements though.
Thanks for the feedback.
I’ve fixed 1) which is something I never noticed before and I’ve added a ‘Posted by’ tag under the title on each full post. Hopefully that makes things clearer.
Steve.