Once you have decided on the concept and approach to monetizing your site, you need to decide what features you will need to implement on your platform. In the case of launching a book review site, these are usually the following features.
Search Engine. Needed so that users will be able to quickly find a review of the book they are interested in. It will also be very good if the search engine will include key filters (genre, rating, author, year, book length, cycle) to help users find something new to read.
Admin panel. Must be integrated with a content management system (CMS) that will allow you to edit site content, manage services, block or delete users. If only you or a select few author critics will write reviews, they will add text to your book review website through the admin panel, as in the CMS WordPress.
Review feed (news). This is the usual feed, which displays the latest news (reviews) and their brief description / introduction. Such a feed can be the main element of the first screen and / or a separate page to which you will need to go through the menu. A brief description of the review in the ribbon should contain: the title and author of the book, genre, rating, cover and the title of the cycle.
Book review and rating. This functionality includes a text editor and the review text page itself. Depending on who will write book reviews on your site, only selected critics or all registered users will have access to the editor. In the latter case you will also need the ability to pre-moderate to prevent the publication of unethical texts.
Genre Category System. Books in your site’s listing should be organized by genre and sub-genre. For example, if you’re going to do book reviews in the fiction genre, the subcategories would be science fiction, action fiction, social fiction, political fiction, and love fiction. In the case of popular science literature, these might be biology, physics, chemistry, psychology, space, technology, and self-development.
Lists of the top 100 books and authors. This is an almost mandatory section for websites with reviews of anything. Here, books can be ranked based on user or author ratings, or sometimes both. Such lists of the best books, authors, or cycles can also be grouped by genre and sub-genre.
Book review community. On some online book review platforms, such as Goodreads, users have the ability to create and join book communities (such as book clubs) where users can chat about book topics, delve more deeply into their chosen genre/subgenre, see what their friends are reading, and more.
Book recommendations. Book review sites also typically offer book recommendations to their users based on previous reads, friends’ preferences, ratings, recommendations from famous critics and/or celebrities, the book’s relationship to the series, popular trends, etc. Such recommendation systems are now being created with the help of deep neural networks.
Registration, login. If a user wants to find and read a review, he does not need to register. However, if he/she wants to write a review, leave a comment, add a book or review to favorites, make a list of books he/she has read, etc., he/she will have to create a user profile. Usually this function is implemented through email or accounts on Google, Facebook, or Twitter.
User profiles. Can include features such as the ability to edit and delete your profile information, add photos, your social media profiles, manage notifications, view ratings, reviews and messages from other users, and change privacy settings. If your site will collect sensitive user data, make sure you comply with GDPR regulations.
Ratings, comments. Users should have the ability to both comment on book reviews and rate those and others. This increases engagement and allows you to understand what content people like, so you can see the direction you need to take the website in.
Protection from spam and scams. Since reviews are an important tool to influence customers and their buying decisions, you should expect that some companies will try to use this to increase positive book reviews by paying people to write fake reviews and give the customer the ratings they want. This problem mainly affects large sites (Amazon, Yelp and Google), but smaller players need to be aware of it as well.