Wigix have announced some improvements to their catalogue pages, on their company blog.

The content has been slightly reorganised and some redundant links removed, plus additional content is exposed within the default view.  This is intended to make the pages look richer and more appealing to prospective buyers aiming to do more product research before making a commitment to buy.  The changes are also announced as making the pages more SEO friendly.

A new product tagging feature has been added.  On all product pages there is a tags section on the right column of the page where users can assign their own tags to the item, and see tags that people have assigned.  When clicking on a tag, users will taken  to a page showing all items with that tag assigned to it, sorted by the highest tag score.  The site home page has had a master Wigix tag cloud added near the bottom of the page.  It lists the top tags that have been assigned.

As people start tagging items in the catalog this has the effect of creating an alternate taxonomy that is completely user generated and community driven.  Site admins state that over time, tagging will be added for other types of content.

The site is still in public Beta while the owners make improvements and iron out bugs – unusual for online venues, they have a bug reporting linkin the page footer, making it easy for users to report problems to the admins.  Sometimes however, “problems” are not bugs (such as the irritating confirmation pop-up when logging out of the site) and it would be nice to see a voting system for features that should be dropped.  From here in South Asia, the site loads very slowly too, though that may be general Internet infrastructure related rather than due to server-load at their end.

The home page still makes a lot of calls for non-buyer / non-seller users (e.g. affiliates and catalogue creators) which hopefully will disappear at the end of public Beta, and be replaced with content to draw buyers into the categories.

Ed