Customers looking for validation of their choice before making a purchase will turn to review sites. It’s a simple fact. You may have searched for and read through countless reviews outlining the pros and cons of – lets say that new laptop you’ve been lusting for – before making that big important buy. And the good news is, with WordPress and a little tweaking with WP Review Site, you can make any site of yours into a powerful review engine.

WP Review Site is one of those plugins that turns WordPress into something more powerful than it already is. Use WP Review Site to turn WordPress into a powerful review site engine. It allows you to easily create niche review sites about anything and everything you want, be it products, computers, gadgets, music, movies, services, websites, restaurants, hotels, credit cards or even beer.

WP Review Site combines has these features:

Add a star rating system to your comment forms – This enables visitors to your WP blog do more than just leave comments: they can write a review and rate it via mousing over star icons. You define the categories, and your visitors can rate between 1 to 5 stars. And WP Review Site is completely customizable to fit your blog’s design; you can display rankings as you see fit, whether you use tables or CSS.

And WP Review Site lets you sort reviews by weighted average rating: you can set it to display reviews by the highest/lowest-rated, and not in chronological order. You can even choose to not show the rating system in some parts of your site. WP Review Site even has various sidebar widgets for you to add a list of top rated items to your site’s sidebar, or a list of recent reviews with the average rating that user left.

And what makes WP Review Site even better for me is that it already comes with seven themes preconfigured to work with the plugin:

• WP Review Site
• WPRS: Aqua Featured
• WPRS: Award Winning Hosts
• WPRS: Bonus Black
• WPRS: Double Silver
• WPRS: Green Featured
• WPRS: Ocean

And even better, WP Review Site has already got its own affiliate link management system that will let you configure your links easier. Instead of inserting the URL for the same anchor text over and over, you can set your review blog to automatically insert affiliate links.

What I don’t care for, however, is the fact that the customization features of WP Review Site is spread over two options pages. I’d like to have everything in one configuration page.

For $97 dollars, you’d get free upgrades for life along with all the features mentioned above.

Pros:

• WP Review Site does the work of many different plugins to make WordPress work as a powerful affiliate review site.
• It comes with seven preconfigured themes
• Affiliate link management system is powerful

Cons:

• Too many separate options pages
• Switching themes would clear the sidebar of widgets

This review was written upon request by the creators of WP Review Site.

Originally posted on October 31, 2008 @ 3:00 pm