Using "The Machine"

 

... or a thumbs down ? Does your Web Site let your customers rate and provide comments for your individual products ?

One of the key capabilities of the Internet is the ability to interact with your current, past and future customers.  This post is going to cover how you can "Use The Machine" to add customer ratings or voting to your existing web site or blog.  This will allow your customers to very easily provide feedback for a specific product or service.

There is a great service called JS-Kit.com that provides not only ratings but also other functionality like user reviews, comments and polls.  They make it easy for anyone to add various user participation abilities on their web site.

So before we get into the details let me quickly say, that it can often create anxiety for small (and large) business owners to expose their products/services to ratings and comments from customers.  Everyone is afraid of the disgruntled customers and the bad ratings/reviews.  However, the Internet has proven that the value to the business owner is in the transparency, that is being open with their perspective customers about the good and bad.  Often the bad provides you an opportunity to not only improve your product or service but also allows you to address the concern in a manner that shows you care about your customers and their feedback. This in the end is invaluable and will help you win over new customers.

OK, on to Using The Machine...

On JS-Kit.com simply copy and past the line of HTML code that is provided for the 
 

<div class="js-kit-rating" starColor="Green" title="" permalink=""></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>

That's it your done.. ;) well specifically for the ratings your done.. you need to modify the above HTML code some based on certain situations or if you want to customize how the ratings show up in your site. There is a list of all the potential customizations on the JS-Kit.com on the Customizing Page. That page shows you how to change the color, display the ratings in different ways and even handle problems like attaching the same rating to a product that might show up in multiple pages on your web site.

I'm going to change my star color to Green.

So here is my rating control for the post, please leave me a rating just click on the stars.

Please rate this Post: