Building a ranking site is one of those hundreds of sporadic ideas which popup in my head every morning. Ranking websites are attractive and touch the softer side of human psyche which every marketeer or genius always try to exploit.
Who doesn’t want to be in the top to and who doesn’t want to be ranked no. 1? If you manage to build a successful ranking website then you can monetize it easily.
Building a full fledge ranking website might require considerable time, effort and investment and I’ve none of these. So in my usual spirit I resort to wodpress to find a quick and dirty solution.
How to Build A Ranking Website using WordPress?
Top 10 Recipe Websites is the first ranking website which I started to build using WordPress and I’ll use this site as example in this tutorial.
Requirements
You will need GD Star Rating plugin and plenty of imagination. You should be also familiar with the WordPress Custom Fields.
Step 1 – Create a custom field for Ranking
This is cheat, but you need to have some parameter to rank. So I started with a custom field called “ranking”.
Step 2 – Sort the posts by Ranking custom field
By default the posts in wordpress are sorted by descending order. All you need to do is to sort the posts by ranking field’s value.
That’s it. your dirty and basic ranking website is ready to shine. Next part is to decorate it.
Step 3 – Customize the Rating
GD Star plugin offers custom function to show the rating/thumbs up. I’ve used the custom thumbup to show the number of thumbs. You can change the thumbup icon as per your choice.
Further enhancements
A more realistic approach for ranking could be to add more parameters in your own basic ranking algorithm. I could think of following parameters which can be used in addition to just thumbups.
1) Number of pages in the websites
2) Number of incoming links
3) Number of facebook page fans
4) Twitter followers
5) Alexa Ranking
I’m yet to utilize above parameters to enhance the ranking site. I’ll keep updated as I work on it.
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