Get involved!
Apr 11th, 2008 by Rosanne
Gluten Savvy is currently looking for:
Contributors
Gluten Savvy welcomes contributions from anyone with tastebuds and an understanding of the challenges facing the gluten-intolerant. Simply register through the link under ‘Admin’ and then you’re ready to start writing restaurant reviews. You should add an e-mail address to your profile so you can be contacted about your review if necessary. I can also set up e-mail addresses at glutensavvy.com for keen contributors. Editorial guidelines are pretty simple:
- Make the title of the post the name of the restaurant followed by the city and country in parentheses.
- Keep each review to under 400 words so they will fit on one screen.
- Write your first paragraph as a bit of an intro and put a “more” tag underneath it so that only the first paragraph shows up on the home page.
- Write as well as you can, and clearly. I’m an editor by profession, so I’ll clean up minor typos I find. All new reviews are placed in a moderation queue and an editor will check them before we publish them.
- Make sure it’s clear that what you’re writing is either direct experience or your opinion. Defamation is a serious issue and comments like “the chef can’t cook” will get us sued, whereas “I hated everything I tasted” is just your opinion. Defamatory statements will be deleted or altered and repeat offenders may be banned.
- Please don’t review your own restaurant. Overly glowing reviews will be checked. The best bet is simply to send e-mail to rbersten@glutensavvy.com asking for a review. We’ll do our best to get a reviewer in your town to help us out. If this happens often enough, we’ll probably start a “wanting reviews” page. Of course, you can always advertise! Send e-mail to advertising@glutensavvy.com with your request. Purchasing advertising DOES NOT GUARANTEE A POSITIVE REVIEW.
- We’re just starting out so the reviews for all cities around the world are currently in the one spot. As time goes on, we’ll add melbourne.glutensavvy.com and newyork.glutensavvy.com and so on. For now, when you post, please add the city your restaurant is in as a tag. if you’re super keen to start a section for your city, send me e-mail at rbersten@glutensavvy.com and I can set you up with editorial access.
- Please select a cuisine style for your review from the categories list. If one doesn’t seem appropriate, add one as a tag, choosing the most broadly descriptive word you can. An editor will add the new category when they edit your review.
- At the bottom of each review, add a star rating out of five, and the restaurant’s name, address and phone number. To insert the star rating, type [rating:] with the number of stars you wish to give (4 or 3.5 or whatever) immediately after the colon. The system will automatically insert the stars. The phone number should be in international format (starting with a + sign, the country code, then the area code and phone number).
Good luck and bon appetit!
Coders
Gluten Savvy is just starting out. If you’re a PHP coder and you’d like to contribute, we’d be thrilled. Right now, all we can offer is love and gratitude in return. For starters, we’d love mapping so people can find the restaurants. Right now, it’s just a WordPress blog, but if you’re a superstar and want to transfer this site into a proper database-driven thing so it can be world-class like Yelp!, then we want to hear from you. Contact Rosanne Bersten with offers.
Designers
Right now, Gluten Savvy is using MistyLook, a fairly straightforward skin for WordPress, with a custom header I bought on iStockPhoto and comped in Illustrator. Offers to spice up the site visually in any way would be welcome. I’d especially like to know how to have the header image only on the front page, but that might take PHP knowledge. If you’re a CSS or PHP designer whiz, get in touch with Rosanne Bersten with samples of your work. Again, we can only offer our thanks as we’re too new to have any money yet.