CoTradeCo news
About plogs, resources, and the tabs on product listings in the CoTradeCo store
beingzoe 2008-09-12 19:27:24 UTC

Community member Dave is a big supporter of CoTradeCo and a fan of Pelican products. In a recent post he mentioned briefly the Pelican 9430 area light and in my response to his post I asked him to post a PLOG about the light. So I thought I would take a minute to discuss plogs and some of the other tabs and resources available in the store and on product listings in particular.

Tabs and hidden information

At CoTradeCo we are doing our darndest to pack a wallop of information on every page in context to what you are viewing, especially for particular products and community information. Since we don’t have millions of dollars for user interface research and testing we just keep experimenting, and the TABBED interface seemed like the best solution for now.

Throughout the site you will see tabs that link you quickly to related information based on what you are looking at. In the communities there is the people tab so you can see who else belongs to a given community. And all over CoTradeCo you will see a resources tab which links you to contextual articles and information from our resource library.

Plogs

Plogs are a feature of the CoTradeCo trading post experience that haven’t been focused on too much yet, but were an integral part of the original CoTradeCo design concept.

As you are probably already aware Trader Dan and the CoTradeCo trading post is big on community. That doesn’t change in our store. While we try not to make the community sections overly commercial we want the store and the community blog to overlap through the resource library and your stories and reviews about the products we sell.

PLOG is short for “Product Log” kind of like a Blog for a product. Trader Dan loves to hear about how you USE the products we carry, interesting things that happen while using them, and your general thoughts about the quality and usefulness of them.

The idea is to not just get reviews of a product but to learn in the context of real people’s experiences what people do with the products and how they work for you on a daily basis, which we think is far more interesting than simply saying you like it or you don’t.

Posting a plog is similar to posting to the community blog. The only real difference is that you need to find the product in the store that you want to post a plog on. We are also working on a wizard so that you will be able to post a plog through the community blog directly.

The key difference when posting a plog is that you indicate whether you own the product or not (or if you have merely used it or heard about it) and then you rate it on our patent pending “Love it / Hate it” scale.

The idea here is to make it easier to put the comments and reviews in context. You can get an idea from a Plog how the individual uses in what industry or situations, whether they own it or use it at work, and from their profile on their SPOT you can see if they have posted other information that you find reliable.

We haven’t promoted the concept too much yet, but as it gets better integrated into the community system we will be making it easier to PLOG and turning it into another valuable tool to help you make more intelligent and useful purchases.

Resources

As mentioned above we have a constantly growing library of articles, tips, tutorials, calculators, and other tools and information to help you with products in the store, as well as provide useful information for the various communities we serve.

While browsing a product in the store, always be sure to take a peak at the Resources tab to see if there is more information such as manuals, spec sheets, PDF’s, charts, or tips and recommendations. You’ll find everything from warranties and RMA information to interactive calculators to help make sense of industry specific requirements.

I hope you find the resources and information at CoTradeCo useful, and I encourage you to post your thoughts and comments about anything and everything, especially product related information so that through the CoTradeCo community we can help each other find just what we need at the best price possible.

Thanks for taking the time to visit and use CoTradeCo. Post your responses here or start a new post in the community blog and tell everybody what you think. And use your SPOT at the trading post to promote you own business or projects and share your stories with the world.