News, Updates & Announcements

User Comparisons and Top Rated Teas

Comparing users:

Now, when you are logged on, you can compare your taste in tea to that of other users. For any users with whom your ratings overlap for at least five teas, RateTea.net will calculate a similarity percentage. The calculation takes into account the fact that some users tend to rate more highly than others, and will give a more accurate representation of the degree to which your preferences really are similar to this user, even if you rate teas on a different scale.

Also, when logged on, the bottom of your profile will now show a list of users with whom there are enough ratings to compare your tastes. The more teas you review, the more likely you will be to benefit from this feature. If you're in a hurry to check out this new feature, you can check through recent reviews or browse the site to locate teas that have been reviewed by other users that you have recently tried or would be able to easily try.

Top rated teas:

There is great demand for using rating websites to locate the "best" products. While this concept is questionable in the world of tea (tastes are inherently subjective and one person's favorite might not even be enjoyable to another), it can still be interesting to see which teas are getting the highest ratings or the most ratings. Because RateTea.net is so young, we don't currently have enough overlapping ratings to say with much confidence which teas are considered best among our users, but we're quickly getting there.

We now have a page on highest rated teas; while it is doubtful that this page (or any page on any website) could ever capture the (preposterous) notion of the "best teas", it will give progressively more meaningful rankings as the ratings roll in. Also of interest, we list the most often rated teas...which will tend to list more mainstream teas, since these will be the teas that the largest number of users have tried. As much as these pages may be interesting to some people, we strongly recommend that you not spend too much time viewing them or thinking about them.

The mission of RateTea.net is to encourage each person to develop their own taste, not to simply seek out teas that the masses have decided are most popular! See what people like, but form your own opinions.

Profile Pics & Linking to Tea Blogs

Promote your tea blog!

At RateTea.net, we do not want to replace tea blogs or get people to stop writing longer reviews--quite to the contrary, we want to encourage bloggers to write more about tea, and to help people locate bloggers who write about tea. We have thus added a new feature allowing users to link their ratings to more detailed reviews on an external blog.

Blogs are organized so that newer material is more prominent. RateTea.net is organized in a different way, cross-indexing teas by brand, style, and region. Linking to your blog from reviews on RateTea.net can be a way to help people discover older posts on your blog that they might not otherwise find.

Don't have a tea blog?

Do you have a blog or website that is not primarily about tea? You can still feel free to write a tea review whenever you like, and link to it from your RateTea.net reviews.

Tea Bloggers on Twitter:

If you use twitter, you may find our twitter list of tea bloggers useful, whether you're a blogger yourself or just want to watch or join in on the conversation. If you do have a tea blog and you're not on the list, make sure to @-message us so that we can add you to this list.

Profile Pictures:

Also, if you notice from the screenshot on the right, we have added profile pictures. You can upload a picture or you can select an image from a list. We hope this will help make our site more personal and help people to quickly identify individual reviewers.

New Layout & Homepage

We are pleased to announce a redesign of our homepage and layout. The new homepage highlights features we've had for a long time, making it easier to find all the information that is already on RateTea.net.

Bringing attention to changes & updates:

Check the links at the top of the screen and you'll now find an Articles link, leading to our collection of articles on tea-related topics. The articles are continually being updated, and articles with recent changes and updates are listed first.

In addition to highlighting recent reviews, the homepage now also displays a tea of the moment and shows new and recently updated articles, as well as listing the most recently updated pages for styles and varieties of tea.

The new design is also easier to modify and maintain, so expect more additions in the future. Just as our number of ratings has grown by over 20% in the past month, we hope to continue improving the quality and functionality of the site.

Thank you!

We'd like to thank everyone who gave us feedback on our old layout and our new layout when we were developing and testing it. We are always open to suggestions, so if you have any further ideas of how we could further improve the layout or any aspect of the site, please contact us!