I read the following blog entry today and found it very interesting and relevant to my problem.

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2...ustomer#resume

I wish I can get my partner to understand this concept. Because of his narrow-minded approach to this site, it remains a site about a couple of "great" books referred by some "wonderful" Internet business partnership program he found.

I soon started to realise that many of these books are not that great after all. I also discovered that the Internet is littered with eBook affiliate sites promoting this kind of junk, without giving an honest opinion or any other information about the eBook, apart from the information can anyway be found on the author's website. (some are so basic they simply list the affiliate link and that's about it).

I made the proposition of doing unprejudiced reviews about all kinds of eBooks to give the eBook buyer an informative opinion about what's hot and what's not. All these reviews will rely heavily on the experience of people who actually used the eBooks, in other words, real customer experience. Publishing insider info like this on your website is priceless information to the customer, making a visit to your website a pleasant one, a pleasant customer experience.

Lets be honest, there are many good eBooks out there, but the Internet is boiling over from all the crap people compile these days, junk they like to call eBooks. There are just as many junk eBooks as there are viruses and spam circulating the Web each day.

Guess what my partner told me when I suggested we added some kind of rating system to our site to let the good e-books stand out from the rest (for instance a simple concept of Gold, Silver and Bronze badges):

"Look our website is about making money. If someone comes across a eBook that we rated as a Bronze book, or a book we did not rate at all, then they will go to another website to buy the same book, or another book and then you lost a possible customer. We should only list the good books and forget about the bad books.

In any case what is the use of listing product on our site if we do not even rate it high ourselves. What some people view as negative about a specific eBook, might not be regarded as negative by all people."


How narrow-minded can you get? I mean, it is about providing useful information to the consumer about which products should be avoided and providing a better solution at the same time. What part of consumer related reviews does he not understand. I was not born yesterday, I know it is silly to list a product on your site if you do not approve of it yourself, but we are talking about a review here, not a sales pitch. Did he think I am going to put an affiliate link on a review page about a bad product, forget it, that is a clear sign to the visitor that the review is not completely unbiased.

It is extra content for the site, which brings in targeted traffic. I discovered through our stats reports that people actually look for negative reviews at times and we got some visitors because of similar queries, but only accidentally because of a combination of certain words used in another context on a specific page.

A good honest, objective review, backed by facts is in the first place unique content and secondly high quality and useful content, creating a good customer experience. And even if you don't get a sale through the visitor, at least he will remember your site because of your honest opinion and will be more likely to buy from you because of the trust you created through a previous positive customer experience.

Kgun, thanks for the advice, at the moment my creative juices are heavily restricted with this site. There may be something useful to do with my C++ and PHP knowledge with this site, but I still have to find a good application of these skills that will provide a unique solution to our visitors. I think the general theme of the website is the restrictive cause. There is only so much you can do with an eBook and Adobe currently dominates the market, so designing another PDF reader for instance is not a good idea. However your remarks sparked an idea for developing something useful for eBook writers instead of focussing on the readers only. Again I wanted to achieve something similar with the rating system, encouraging good, respectable and honest eBook writers to promote their eBooks through our website.

I think I might be wasting my time with my involvement in this website. If he does not want to take good advice then he should find another web designer who will eat up all this crap.