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MEMBER IMAGE GALLERY
Example Graphic Artists Gallery
This tutorial demonstrates how one might use the Member features that Review Foundry has to offer to set up a combined review section and image gallery for a community of graphic artists. Of course, the discussion applies equally well to any other type of community--instead of a gallery of graphic art works, simply substitute a gallery of member supplied photos relating to the theme of the site. In particular, this tutorial demonstrates how one goes about manipulating the Team branch of the application, as opposed to the Category branch considered in How To Create An Affiliate Review Site and How To Create An Adult Review Site (in fact the content of this tutorial borrows heavily, and unapologetically, from Tutorial Two).
Before we launch a discussion on how to tailor the application to a group of graphic artists, it is worth noting that if you have an online community of any type supported, say, by an application like vBulletin, you can significantly enhance the desire on the part of members to get involved with your site by giving them member pages enhanced by reviews and image galleries. In an age of digital photography, who does not have a dozen images they would like to share with the world?
Continuing in our tradition of following the progress of a fictional Review Foundry webmaster, we conjure up Luke, a part-time digital artist who has created an online community dedicated to the graphic arts. Currently his members use vBulletin to communicate, and now he intends to use Review Foundry to let them display their works and get feedback via reviews. For this, Review Foundry is perfectly suited. Each artist will get their own member profile page PLUS a separate detail page, complete with a gallery of their own works of art and one or more pages of member reviews. A forward glance at the end result of Luke's work can be seen on this artist detail page.
In Luke's case many of the steps needed to set up his web directory are the same ones that Clare encountered in How To Create An Affiliate Review Site. Therefore, instead of spelling out details about how to add the categories into which the models might be grouped, or the process by which rating attributes are created and associated with those categories, we leave those discussions to How To Create An Affiliate Review Site and concentrate instead on those tasks unique to Luke's case. In particular, in addition to setting up a detail page for each model, Luke intends to add a small gallery of images for each model. This will require the addition of special image columns that allow for easy uploading and automatic thumbnailing of the images. The formatting of the images on the page is already built into Review Foundry, so the entire process is really very simple.
We will suppose that Luke has settled upon a suitable categorization scheme, a portion of which might include categories such as:
- Amateur > College
- Amateur > Housewives
- Porn Stars > Softcore
- Porn Stars > Hardcore
For each of the categories added, Luke wants to customize the selection of model attributes that can be rated by the members. For instance, the attributes he decides are best suited the Amateur > Housewives category are these:
- Sex Appeal
- Engaging Photos
- Special Something
- Must See
Obviously, choosing the right selection of attributes for your categories will increase the likelihood that members will submit ratings as well as the chances that your overall offering is well appreciated by your web traffic. In Luke's case, this might translate to click-through rates on any affiliate links.
Now that you have some appreciation of what Luke hopes to achieve it is time to return to the Table of Contents and see how he goes about doing it.
Documentation
Documentation for Review Foundry, which is entirely separate from these tutorial pages, is an ongoing project (as is this tutorial). You should find that there is sufficient information in the Review Foundry User Manual to answer most of your technical needs. Suggestions for improvement to both the User Manual and this tutorial are always welcomed. As more users gain experience with Review Foundry, and issues are resolved for its application in different areas, information gained from that experience will make its way into these pages.
Note: If you cannot find the information you are looking for in this tutorial, try the Review Foundry User Manual which you should find far more comprehensive than the instructional dialog found here.
Next Section: ADDING TEAMS
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