Improving Review section;what website has the best layout for reviews?

[mouser]

In our continuing effort to take our review section to the next level, and make it the best software review site on the web, i'm asking for some help figuring out how we can improve things.

Some preliminary thoughts:

• break reviews into multipl pages with easy navigation between them
• a separate 'page' for each product, plus some inro, comparison, and summary pages would make it easier to maintain/update and write and read.
• make a more inviting start page where people can see existing reviews nicely presented to choose from.

I'd love to hear more ideas for ways to improve the review section.
And I'm also asking people to post links to website designs that you think *present* their reviews in a nice way, both in terms of presenting a single review and for presenting the collection of reviews to browse.  Remember it's not the content of these sites we care about for this question, just the manner of presenting reviews/articles.

thanks!

[Creamy Goodness]

if you decide to "break reviews into multipl pages with easy navigation between them" you should consider adding a 'print this review' link that opens the whole thing up in a single page again. Not just for printing (i would never do that) but when you are browsing the net on a slow connection it's nice to load the whole thing up at once. the reviews at anandtech work like this btw.

[jgpaiva]

• break reviews into multiple pages with easy navigation between them
• a separate 'page' for each product, plus some intro, comparison, and summary pages would make it easier to maintain/update and write and read.

-mouser (February 04, 2006, 11:52 PM)

[mouser]

cg, print review link is a very good idea; in fact it's been asked for even in our current format, since the sidebar makes it harder to print.

[allen]

If you switch to, even if just for the reviews, dynamic pages -- store the reviews in a database or just as text -- generating printable pages would be a breeze.  An alternate way to do it would be to use another stylesheet.  Keeping the content separate from the design makes for much easier site overhauls in the longrun, though.

That said, I don't have a good example at the moment but I do have a "don't do this" example -- lockergnome.com.  I've followed lockergnome since . . . well, long before he had html mail and have watched as, each year, the space for the articles gets smaller.  On a low resolution, I have trouble figuring out where in the sidebars, links and ads the article is hidden.

Not that this was somethign I was worried about happening Just sayin'

I, personally, am not fond of reviews being broken up -- usually because it's at the end of the article that I know I want to bookmark it for later.  I don't always remember to go back to page 1.   That's probably rather trivial, though.  And a printer-friendly all-on-one-page version would solve it.