This Week's Assignment

(This post is part of an assignment for the class I am taking, Writing for Digital Media at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This week, I will be identifying a publication for which I will continue to create online content for later assignments.)

crowdrestaurantreviews.com

Proposal: A restaurant review site set up in the fashion of a social network where people can contribute their own restaurant reviews, ratings, comments, photos, videos, relevant files (menus, etc.), and recommend specific dishes. They can also help improve the site by linking to restaurant sanitation grades, other reviews (professional or otherwise), and other information such as franchise information, news articles, or the restaurant’s web site. In addition, users will be able to display their favorite restaurants and friends (other members) on their profile page, identify if they are a foodservice employee, and link to other social networking sites.

Restaurant owners or managers will also be able to participate by adding messages, twitter/RSS feeds, menus, links, and photos, and will have an option to advertise via banners on their page(s). Each restaurant’s page will automatically display name, address, phone, and a Google map based on restaurant listings in each metro area. (Pilot site is raleigh.crowdrestaurantreviews.com).

The site will also include a robust restaurant search feature which will search keywords from the page as well as the review & comment areas of the pages (a search for “spaghetti alla carbonara” would return results where that term was found in the user-supplied text). In addition, users will be able to search by restaurant type, price range, and location.

Restaurant profile pages will be easy to scan and show the most pertinent information (as available): Sanitation grade, google map, menu, average user star rating, list of reviews to read, editor’s review, hours, price range, and a photo.

Purpose: Currently, restaurant reviews are scattered all over the place on the web. The most popular site for local information, citysearch, seems to be the preferred place to look, but it only allows for comments and a star rating from registered users. In addition, there is no one site that concentrates solely on restaurant reviews in Raleigh. raleighrestaurantreviews.com is close, but it is pulling reviews from a host of other sites which makes the information overwhelming in volume. The purpose of crowdrestaurantreviews.com is to give a true “crowdsourced” view of each restaurant – allowing users to be the food critic, write their own review(s) and add pictures and/or video to make each review much more realistic and complete, instead of just displaying a laundry list of comments.

Competition: Citysearch.com, tripadvisor.com, diningguide.com, raleighrestaurantreviews.com, many others.

Audience: The audience of this site is vast, as it covers anyone who eats out and may be looking for specific information about a restaurant online. The main theme will be “…where you are the food critic”, so an important part of the audience will be people who enjoy writing and reporting, to include students and people with an interest or who work in a journalistic field.

The larger chunk of the audience, though, will be those looking for restaurant information online, so they will be educated, middle-to-upper class people looking for a good dining experience. They will be largely web-savvy, and will be looking for critical information to be up front and well-organized.

Age ranges likely are to be college-age through upper-middle-age. Although the pilot site is based on Raleigh, NC restaurants for now, this model could easily be applied nationally and even globally. The site will need to be tested on all platforms and browsers due to the diverse nature of the audience. Because of the dense multimedia experience this site will provide, non-broadband users would likely shy away. Advanced browser features and broadband are needed to fully experience this site.

Design: The design of this site, as noted, will focus on getting the most relevant information up front in an easy-to-digest format. The primary color scheme will be burgundy, since red is associated with restaurants where people like to sit and linger, and also has a wine connotation.

Style Guide: The Associated Press Style Guide will be used to guide the (non-contributed) content of this site.