Many of our clients on PHP platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal have long benefited from our SEO Add-On.

All of our Packages provide Google Juice and Star Ratings in Search results to client sites via our review Hub, LouderYou. The advantage of this approach is ease of deployment. Our code can be added in seconds to a web-page and reviews are then live. Those reviews are indexed on our hub within hours.

More and more sites are moving to WordPress as their platform. We have long been WP users and all of our sites are built on it.

The LouderVoice reviews system has always supported WordPress sites but we recently decided to make it even easier to deploy on them.

The new LouderVoice Reviews plug-in is now available and included in the price of all of our Packages. With a few quick clicks, you can install the plug-in and configure reviews for one or more pages on any WP site.

Business books will be written about the amazing story of the new Fastnet Line Ferry to Ireland. This much needed service operating from Swansea to Cork is proving to be a major success for the region. So you can imagine our excitement at LouderVoice becoming part of this story by powering the customer reviews on their site.

Whilst reviews are important for any business, their importance to new businesses cannot be under-estimated. The response from travellers has been phenomenal since reviews were turned on last week. The unique direct feedback has enabled Fastnet Line to immediately discover what is working very well and what can potentially be changed or improved.

LouderVoice was the first reviews company to realise the importance of Twitter. That’s why we’re the people behind @review which we launched in June 2007.

Since then we’ve played and tweaked mini-reviews based on user feedback.

Following more research we realised that many people were doing mini-reviews using the simple method of just adding #review on to the end of the tweet. This was also the preferred approach in our recent poll.

Yesterday evening we uploaded the first public beta of our Google Android mobile application to the Android Market.

This is the first Irish Android application and one of the very first reviewing applications on the platform.

You’ll have to patiently wait for the launches of the HTC Magic and Samsung I7500 before  most Irish people can try it out. Anyone living in countries where Android is already live can install it now.

We have two bits of news about our LouderVoice plug-in. The first is that it is now WordPress 2.7 compatible and the second is that we have moved the hosting over to WordPress.org. This means that from now on, when we update it, you’ll see a notification in your WordPress Admin Panel.

Apart from the 2.7 compatibility change, the only other major feature is that you can opt to have all the contextual information about the review, including the stars, at the end of the text. Full instructions in the readme.

As you probably know, LouderVoice was the first company to identify Twitter as an important source of reviews. We launched LouderTweets structured reviews all the way back in June 2007. We are also the people behind the @review user.

Whilst many people have used the structured reviews since then, many others have found the structure difficult to remember or just plain awkward.

We turned on free-form reviews on SMS last year and most people are much happier with that. They simply send an SMS to us beginning with “RE” (or one of our partners’ keywords) and the remainder of the review is in whatever style they like.

Many thanks to Loud Reviewer Frank Prendergast for spotting a bug in our WordPress plug-in. This bug prevented users from setting review posts to publish in the future. The bug has now been fixed and the updated plug-in is available here.

You’ve probably noticed how quiet we’ve been on the blog. Not only have we been fixing a lot of small bugs on the site that crept in with the Version2 launch but we’re been working hard on building our API. This will enable other sites to embed our reviewing functionality on their pages. We’ll be going live very shortly with the first partner on this. This XML API is accessible directly, using a PHP library or using a JS library (with more coming soon).  If this is something you’d like to hear more about, please contact conor AT loudervoice DOT com. We’re putting together some information pages on it at the moment too.

We’ve been promising it forever and now we’re finally ready to unveil the all-new LouderVoice WordPress plug-in V2.0. This enables you to write reviews on your blog using an open standard called hReview. Sites like LouderVoice can then index and interpret them more intelligently than raw blog-posts.

The new plug-in is a total re-write based on lots of user feedback and, in particular, some fantastic suggestions and guidance from Robin Blandford.

The approach we have taken with reviews on blogs until now has been built around a standard called hreview. Many bloggers are a fan of this portable format and we continue to support it strongly. But we have received many requests for something more lightweight which still enables people to get their reviews into LouderVoice but takes much less effort.

After trying a variety of approaches we have settled on something we are calling Flag Tags (thanks to Frank Prendergast for coining this). The idea is simple. If you are writing a blog post that is a review, you need to ensure three very basic things: