New Pages For Tea Brands: Search And Browse Teas Easily
Monday, February 20th, 2012
A screenshot of the new brand page, showing Harney and Sons.We have launched a major redesign of the pages for each brand of tea on our website in order to make RateTea easier to explore. This redesign affects 300 pages on our site, and was launched Wednesday, February 15th, 2011, with some small follow-up changes and tweaks continued through today.
The new brand page contains many of the same features as before, but no longer has a full listing of the company's teas. Instead, you are pointed to the browse teas feature, a more powerful tool which can not only list a companies teas, but allow filtering by different properties like the teas' style, region, or whether the teas are loose-leaf, organic, or fair-trade certified.
What you will find:
- Easier-to-access links to the listings of each brand's teas. These include the browse teas link, a search box to allow you to quickly search all teas from a particular brand, and links to browse all teas from a given brand by region or by style.
- Online contact info for each brand or tea company: you will now see, when it exists, a link to the company's twitter and facebook pages, as well as the company's listing on Steepster, the other major tea-focused social networking website besides RateTea.
- Listings of the top five most-rated teas and highest-rated teas for each brand, when available. Currently, this information is available for the major brands of tea, and there is partial information available for a number of small companies. You can help us to gather more data by rating and reviewing more teas from the smaller companies.
The Browse Teas feature carries such benefits of filtering pure teas from flavored teas, filtering by region or specific styles of tea, or limiting one's search to loose-leaf teas or organic teas.
The advantages of using RateTea to find teas:
While some tea companies list their teas by region and by type (what we call style), relatively few tea companies have their whole catalogue of tea cross-indexed and searchable by both style and region, and, to our knowledge, no company has as exhaustive a list of styles of tea and regions of tea as we do. Furthermore, different tea companies use different classification schemes, so if you are used to how one company categorizes their teas, you may find it hard to find similar teas on another company's website.By using RateTea to look up teas, you can also gain the advantage of comparison shopping, quickly locating different companies selling similar teas, as well as learning more about the teas sold by the tea companies you already buy from. We hope that our new brand page will draw attention to these features and benefits, and make them easier to access and use.
Stay tuned for continuous improvements to the site in the future. And please let us know about how these features work for you, as well as if there are any features you would like us to add.
