Thursday, August 21, 2008

Review of a Photo Book Review Site

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine (Tim Leonhardt) launched a site that I thought was pretty cool. The fact that I was able to participate in some ways made it cooler of course, but here is what I like about it. The site is a Photo Book Review site (fotobookreview.com) to compare publishers of photo books.

First off, the organization of the presentation makes any data complexity a non-issue. So as a user ticks off things they want in a photobook (from the menu on the left), the publishers who offer those books are listed on the right. This is all done in a non-postback/javascript way.

Once a list of publishers is set, the user can then select up to five to compare pricing and book options. The cool thing here is the pricing check. There is a textbox that the user can use to put in their estimated number of pages. At that point, the photo books the publisher offers are redisplayed with an estimated price.

So, for example, lets say you want to produce a photo book which you think will be around 28 pages. You have heard of VioVio and Shutterfly, but don't know how much each will cost or which options you have. All you do is fire up FotoBookReview.com, select the publishers, and you end up on the VioVio and Shutterfly comparison page. Once you plug in your number of pages, voila, you have an estimated price for each book those publishers produce.

The site is poised for more things to come, so I hope it continues to grow. I'm sure Tim would want comments and feedback if you have any.