It appears that I owe whogets.com an apology, I recently commented that they cancelled the payment for the review I did of their website. They have been in touch and informed me that they did not cancel the review so it must have been an error on the part of reviewme.
So I am using this post to formally apologise to whogets.com and take back the statement. I will get in touch with reviewme and find out why they cancelled payment of the review.
Last week I did a review for the Review-Me service of a website called whogets.com. Now I believe I did an honest and constructive review of the site and I certainly spent more time on it than the small fee deserved of my time but I always believe in doing a thorough job or not doing it at all.
Now it is true that while I stated the website itself looked fine, I did question they’re whole sweepstake model and considered it flawed. Well it turns out that they did not approve of my comments and cancelled payment for the review. Now in my mind if you pay for a set of reviews and cannot handle an honest opinion then you should not have asked for a review in the first place.
I am very disappointed that they cancelled payment for the review and I am also disappointed that review-me allows them too. In my mind this means one of two things of the whole service:
Now I for one intend to keep my integrity and will not lie about a website, if I think there are flaws I will say so, even if it means I don’t get paid for the review.
As always any comments on this are welcome.
Here is my second site review through the Review Me program. For anyone who is not familiar with Review Me, it is a third party service that puts bloggers and site owners in touch and for a fee the blog owner can provide a review of the website in question. If you are interested in me reviewing your website, follow this link. The current cost for a review is $30.
My second review is for a site called WhoGets.com. Who Gets, is an online sweepstake site with a slight twist on the usual format. As with many sweepstake sites, there are multiple competitions running and anyone can enter the competitions for free. The difference with Who Gets, is that the winner is ultimately chosen by all the members of the site. All the entrants get to plead their case of why they should win and the one with the most votes at the end will get the prize. Before going further I should probably point out that competitions are only valid for US residents and even a few US states are excluded.
At the time of writing Who Gets had competitions running for Ipod Shuffles, clothing, DVD’s and some prepaid phone cards. So this should give you a good idea of the general prize values.
The Website
In terms of the site itself I found it to be reasonably well design, plenty of white space and easy to read pages. I did not really like the side navigation menu with it’s drop down options, but apart from that the site is pretty easy to get around. Each competition has it’s own dedicated page and the page contains some social bookmarking tools. There is also a comments function for members to post comments on each competiton. Registration is also free and easy to do.
Who Gets Home Page
The Concept
I have to say that I find the whole concept of this site extremely flawed, but I wonder if this is me being overly cynical. After looking around a few competitions, it became obvious that the person who would win would be the one who pleaded the saddest case. Now while this is an obvious thing, how do you know that these pleadings are genuine, with a website this is impossible. Also you read the comments on any competition and they are just full of “Please vote for me” messages.
I really cannot see the point of this concept, surely the model of a random contest winner is far more fair and fun than this pleading. I could understand if this was used in the case of a tie break, but to have it as your whole competition model just seems ridiculous to me.
Who Gets Competition Page
Overall
In terms of website design, there is little to fault with Who Gets, however as a concept I personally think it leaves a lot to be desired. By all means have a sweepstake website, but making everyone beg to win, I don’t think so.
This is my first site review through the Review Me program. For anyone who is not familiar with Review Me, it is a third party service that puts bloggers and site owners in touch and for a fee the blog owner can provide a review of the website in question. If you are interested in me reviewing your website, follow this link. The current cost for a review is $30.
So my first review is of a site called Apogee Search, before commencing the review I’ll just quote what apogee describe themselves as “Since its inception in 2001, Apogee Search has rapidly grown to become one of the 25 largest Search Engine Marketing firms in the world. Founded by early Internet pioneers and McKinsey & Co. alumni, Apogee focuses on a variety of proven online marketing methods that include paid search, natural search, affiliate marketing, and pay-per-call. All of Apogee Search’s solutions are designed to drive qualified, targeted visitors to B2B and B2C websites for more leads, customers, revenues and profits.”
Apogee Home Page
Now before I continue, I should point out that I have not used any of Apogee’s services as a customer myself so I cannot comment on the quality of their SEO, PPC or affiliate marketing services. So this review will be purely based on the services and content that are available from their website. The website itself is broken into four main sections, there are Search Engine Marketing, Company Information, Online Marketing Blog and Downloads and Resources. I’ll just give a quick overview of each section.
This is the section of the site where Apogee wants your business so although there is some free information available, such as PPC, SEO and Affiliate Marketing FAQ’s and white papers available on request. Most of it is ultimately geared to getting you in touch with them to discuss your business requirements. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, it’s how they make they’re money after all. Just don’t go expecting to get lots of information for free.
This is just a page of background information on the company itself and the kind of services they offer.
Online Marketing Blog
Apogee also provides a kind of Search Marketing inside blog that covers news on Paid Search (Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising), Natural Search (Search Engine Optimization or SEO), Pay Per Call and Affiliate Marketing. The blog covers a lot of news and opinions on the search engine world, with a lot of focus on Google. If I see any problem with it, it’s that it is not updated too regularly. For example there were just three posts in April. Even I can usually manage a little more than that. A good resource I feel, but drastically in need of more regular content.
Finally we have a page of useful download links, from Apogee themselves we have white papers, some articles and a list of related conferences and tradeshows. In terms of third party links we have Google and Yahoo tools such as toolbars and webmaster resources, and finally we have links to a few third party SEO tools.
So there you have it, most of the site is clearly designed towards getting your SEO, PPC and Affiliate Marketing business, but there are also some small amounts of free information if you look around the site. The website itself is easy to navigate if a little bland and text heavy.
My blog is mainly about programming in .Net 2, website promotion and affiliate marketing although I do have the odd ramble on about anything that comes to mind.
