Phred writes: Charlottesville-Dining.com, an online dining guide with over 250 local eatery listings, is now live. Featuring user ratings and comments, over 20 categories of restaurants, restaurant reviews, and an online forum, Charlottesville-Dining.com is the premier online interactive dining guide for the Charlottesville area. Check it out and start adding your own ratings and comments!
I normally don’t post press releasey kind of things (we get ’em all the time), but I’ve got a soft spot for not-for-profit websites of local interest.
Kinda fun… I just rated a few & tried to add a comment about Baggby’s rickety & uncomfortable chairs (Main St.) but it didn’t show up! Grrr…
Check again. Your comments are now listed. Because there are some people who don’t know how to give constructive criticism, all comments are reviewed before being posted. However, this is NOT done in an attempt to prevent negative comments. We just prefer something like, “[Baggby’s] chairs are rickety & just simply suck – get it to go and find a spot outside on the mall to eat,” to something like, “This place sucks!” Luckily, we haven’t had any of the latter comments show up yet, but we want to ensure that we are providing diners with helpful information in making a dining decision.
By the way, Charlottesville-Dining.com, while not yet making a single dime of income, IS a for-profit entity. This was brought to the attention of Waldo after reading the original posting and we wanted it to be brought to the attention of any future readers.
Finally, a relatively up-to-date site on Charlottesville restaurants! Will it feature links to restaurants’ web pages (or only if the restaurants pay for it)?
One thing I thought was a bit weird was factoring in wait time in describing the service. To my mind, if you have to wait forever to get in but the service is great once you get there, factoring in the wait time really gives an inaccurate description of the service b/c wait time is often a factor beyond the restaurant’s control. Some of the most popular restuarants in town have terrible wait times because they’re so damn good. Do other folks see this differently — that quality of service should factor in wait time?
how will it generate income?
That’s a good question. At this point, we have several plans for generating income, including having restaurants pay to upgrade their listing so they can have more information provided than just their name, address, and phone number. This extra information includes things like a web site link, mapped directions, coupons, hours, payments accepted, price range, restaurant amenities, and more.
We haven’t begun approaching restaurants yet to upgrade their listing, just like we haven’t begun advertising the site yet beyond here at cvillenews.com . However, if early indications are a sign of things to come, Charlottesville-Dining.com is going to become a popular site for the C’ville community and restaurant owners would be wise to use the site to their benefit.
As all things go, we’ll know soon enough.
The definition from the site for “Service” is: “The quality of the service provided including wait time for seating and food, attentiveness, attitude, and helpfulness.”
However, in the end, Charlottesville-Dining.com is a site for the people and by the people and it is always up to you what the definition means to you. It may mean different things to different people. Some people may place an emphasis on the wait time for seating because that is something that annoys them the most, while others may place an emphasis on whether or not their drink glass is kept full (that’s me). In the end, it’s all an indication of the Service provided by the restaurant.
In the future, a question like this would make a great conversation on the Charlottesville-Dining.com Forums. I have created a new forum called “General Questions” where topics like this can be discussed. Also, registration for the forums, while encouraged, is not required.
So what you’re saying is that because you guys are gonna suck up to restaurants for ad space, you’re gonna stymie the notion of ‘free speech’ by ‘moderating’ the postings. waahhh…sounds like another SITE THAT SUCKS!
Freedom of speech is great, but knowledge of what you’re talking about is even better.
If you had taken the time to look through our site, you would have seen many restaurants with both favorable and unfavorable ratings and comments. No ratings are ever moderated and the only comments that are rejected are those that sound very much like your own comments, like “This restaurant sucks.” Why are those rejected? Because they serve no purpose for our users who are looking for reasons why or why not to choose a restuarant.If you want to say a restaurant sucks, then say WHY it sucks. Is it the food, the service, the pricing, or something else? If there is reasoning within the commments, then they will absolutely be accepted.
If you don’t believe me, then just look through the site and/or submit your own comments and see if they go through. An actual comment that did go through: “Ick. Small and grungy. Owner was downright rude. Waitstaff is decent. Seems like a watering hole for local drunks, and I don’t mean UVA students either. Struck me as the ‘5-o-clock whistle just blew, time to drop the whole paycheck on beer and watch the game on a small TV’ crowd.”
So tell me, are we “sucking up to the restaurants” by allowing comments like that? There are more like that… if you bother to visit the web site.
Have you seen my comments on that site?? I’m surprised that MANY went through. This is a site that C’ville needs badly. I think if you look at the “other” sites those were the ones “sucking up”.
8Fan
It looks great — I just have one question or comment. Can you put something on the restaurant site that says whether a restaurant has any comments? I would be more inclined to look at the comments if I knew there would be comments. I guess what I’m saying is something that flags comments. Otherwise, it’s a great site!
You should see “x Comments” or “Add a Comment” depending on if a restaurant has any comments or not, with “x” being the number of comments a restaurant has if it has any.
In the future, you can submit feedback like this either to our Suggestion Box or our Feedback Forum. Or if you prefer to just send the comments directly to us, you can also use our contact form. Thanks!