HomeStars – News and Updates

HomeStars launches in Ottawa

When you have a house like this, you know it will need repairs!

All kidding aside, HomeStars is now moving into the the Ottawa area in a big way.  After successful launches last year into Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, HomeStars added new team member Alicia Wanless in the Ottawa. Alicia just purchased a house south of Ottawa and is in the process of renovating in, and blogging about the experience, so she knows what it’s like to go through a reno. She will be helping companies get found on the site, as well as building the market.

We will also be attending the upcoming Ottawa Home and Design Show, where we will be introducing the service to local homeowners, as well as offering our HomeShow promotion of a $5 card for a Tim Hortons or Starbucks card for reviewing your favourite (or least favourite) home service provider.

HomeStars will help homeowners in the Ottawa region find the best in home improvement and avoid the worse. As an example Damian in Barrhaven hired Ottawa General Contractors, and had a fantastic experience. David in Centretown used The Maytag Store and said “The deliveries were on time, after service excellent and even recommended an installer.”. 10 out of 10. HomeStars can also be used to avoid disaster. P’d in Ottawa hired Ottawa Maid Service and said of the experience: “Sent a “fill-in” cleaner for 5 hours – stayed a little over 4. Job was less than average. Glass was a mess, carpet on stairs not vacuumed, my equipment (vacuum, mop, pail, etc.) left where it was last used (as opposed to put away), dirty rags left on kitchen counter.”

We want to help Ottawa folks avoid experiences like P’d, and experience the great service like Damian in Centretown did.

If you are in Ottawa, and want to share an experience on HomeStars check out our Chapters Promotion where if you register and write some reviews, we’ll send you a Chapters Gift Card for $15. If you are a company and want to find savvy homeowners who do their research before hiring, make sure you claim your listing on the site, and ask your customers to review your great work. That way others will know where to find you and how good you are.

We could kid about how our nation’s capital is in need of good people to repair the city, and the country, but if you’re looking for real repairs in Ottawa, check out HomeStars.

Posted by BrianS

Lastest Site Update – Feedback Tab, Better Search and More…

We’re always trying to make our site better for our users, both companies who use the site as a social media platform, as well as homeowners who rely and trust the community to give them the information they need to find the best home improvement specialists.

Here’s some new features we’ve just launched:

1. Feedback Tab
One of the main features of this release is the new site-wide Feedback tab on the right margin of every site page. This will help you let us know if there are problems or issues on the site, or if they just want to say hi.

This is the screen that will pop up when you click the feedback tab. Fill in your information, and your issue, and we’ll get back to you on making sure your concerns are addressed.

2. Search

Search is a challenge. (There’s a good reason Google is where they are today) But that doesn’t mean we can’t make search better. In the constant vein of search improvement, we’ve added a feature that allows users to only search for company names.

See the new tick box? If you click there, the site will only search for companies by name.

This little box will make it much easier for homeowners to both find specific companies as well offer our standard search to find relevant highly reviewed companies by keyword.

3. Pagination in reviews – company and homeowner dash

Some companies and homeowners on our site had either written or received so many reviews the page to manage those reviews was getting REALLY long.  Well, pagination has arrived. Now both Homeowner and company review pages show 10 reviews at a time.

We also fixed a number of other little issues, in the site, which were kind of techie. Enjoy the new features and look for more to come.

Posted by BrianS

Happy Canada Day – Don’t forget to Pay More Tax!

It would be a celebration if didn’t cost you an arm and a leg. July 1st marks the both the country’s 143 birthday and also, as an added bonus this year, it is the day we start paying HST in BC and Ontario!

Whooo Hooo! Party on Canada!

No one likes paying more taxes but I guess the Government of Canada realizes that July 1st is the day Canadians are most likely to get a little sentimental about the greatness of our fine country: its beauty, its freedom, its health-care, its wide varieties of micro-breweries,  and all of these things will help soften the blow of higher taxes, the latter being arguably the most effective.

We’ll be out of the office today relaxing. Happy Canada Day from the HomeStars Team! Hope it’s a sunny one for all of us!

Posted by Colleen

New Features To Our Site

You may have noticed that there are some features to our site that are a bit different today. Our technical team has released some new features that have been designed to improve the experience of the site for the homeowner. We hope these features make logging in and using the site a little more intuitive for you; check out more about the new features below:

1. Homeowner Registration Screen

There is no more redirection to the registration screen. Whenever a you preform an action that requires registration, a pop up box, just like the one above, will appear and prompt you for the required information. Once the registration is complete, you will be right back where you were before the registration began. Another great feature is that user-names will now be created for you based on the information provided in the name and postal/zip code fields. This name can be edited as desired.  User-names can also be duplicated now which is great news for all the Mary and John and Kathys of Toronto!

2. Sign In

Just like the registration above, whenever you do something on the site that requires a sign in, a sign in pop-up box will appear. Once signed in, the pop- up box disappears and  you are right back where you started.

3. Forgot Password

The forgotten password process follows the same pop-up style window as the Sign In and Registration Screens. Simply enter your email address and select ‘reset password’ to have an email sent to reset password on your account.

4. Message Centre

We now have a brand new tool that will let you know relevant events as they happen (think facebook notifications).  This feature will let you know when your review has been approved or if your profile has been updated. The Message Centre will become more important as we release new features planned for the site.

Posted by Colleen

Yellow pages stops printing phone books while Sears catalogue starts anew…

I just read yesterday’s Globe article that the Yellow Pages Group has finally decided to stop printing booster seats, I mean paperweights… sorry… I mean the phone book.  They are only halting production in 7 major cities and it’s just the white pages, not the yellow one filled with advertisements that generate a couple billion dollars in revenue a year. But they can see the writing on the wall, as people have been moving online to search engines and to mobile phones to quickly get phone numbers. YellowPages will still offer the phone book (white pages) in smaller cities, and if you request a copy. I wonder what they plan to do with the Yellow Door Stop  - I actually found a recent post where someone has created a nice way to make it an attractive one.

Phone Book into a Door Stop

But while I was pondering this major shift I also noticed that Sears dropped a big parcel on my front door a few days ago. It came as a shock – bringing back a childhood flashback as I used to pore over a similar looking Eaton’s catalogue before Christmas. I was wondering why they felt they needed to print a static one year album of goods when they have a great web site and weekly flyers and ads already circulaing. Was it because IKEA still has their catalogue delivered? Theirs is 1/4 the thickness I should mention. I showed it to a couple of friends who chuckled and also reminisced about their same childhood memories. Maybe that’s the idea – get people recalling fond memories of sifting through these massive books so they are lulled into buying from Sears. It says it’s the Fall and Winter 2010 catalogue with a woman wearing a black jacket – in this heat it was not a hook for me to look any further. I’m only an opinion of one though so if you like the catalogue and want to order online, you can look and order here. If they were smart – they’d have added toys and video games- my kids would have attacked the catalogue and made me go. Best Buy knows a thing or two.

Sears Fall 2010 catalogue

Sears catalogue: pg 754 bedroom furniture

Posted by NancyP

A Long Overdue Introduction From Colleen

Hello to the Homestars .com community! I’ve been a part of the Homestars team since January of this year and it’s high time I finally introduce myself as the Content Manager here at Homestars.  Content Manager? What the heck does that mean? Well please allow me to explain.

As the Content Manager I am responsible for a lot of things, from blog and forum posts to twitter and facebook activity. I also write newsletters! But most importantly of all I read ALL of the reviews. I work very hard to ensure that the information on our site is useful for homeowners and that reviews are from authentic customers of the company for which they are written. This process is not always 100% but I do have a few tricks up my sleeve for validating reviews.

In a recent planning session here at homestars, we identified trust as one of the key factors that will impact the success of our website. We are now developing new features for the site that will allow for more transparency around the review process and investigations we do on a daily basis.  We are committed to making this site a trusted source for homeowners and home contractors. If you ever have any questions regarding any of the things I have mentioned here, please email me at colleen@homestars.com. (or here @colleenhomestar)

In other news: FUN FACTS: Did you know that the saying ‘in a heartbeat’ has been used in over eighty-five reviews on Homestars .com? I did. The word ‘disaster’ also appears in over 220 reviews, while the phrase “would hire them again” shows up in over 350 reviews. I’ve got a million of them!

I will be blogging here more frequently from now on so check back to see what’s up. If you have anything you would like to see more of or any feedback for me please comment here or send me an email to address above.

Thanks homestars see you soon.

Posted by Colleen

HomeStars helps YegHelp – in Aid of Womens Shelters in Edmonton

HomeStars has launched a site to help an organization called YegHelp to raise money for Women’s Shelters through the Royal LePage Shelter Foundation. The specific shelter which YegHelp is assisting is the LaSalle Shelter in Edmonton.

If you register through this page, HomeStars will donate $10 for each review written to the YegHelp cause, which goes to help this womens shelter.

YegHelp was put together by innovative real estate agent and bacon lover Jerry Aulenbach, who raised some money last year, but this year decided he could use his powerful network, built by social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and his own website.  I met Jerry at Twestival Edmonton when I was in Edmonton a few weeks ago and was impressed with his enthusiasm and creativity for changing the status quo using social media – from his profession of real estate to fund-raising. We thought we’d help him out on this project by offering to sponsor T-Shirt for the event as well as offering $10 for each review written in the name of the cause.

So feel free register at the site and then write a story about your local plumber, roofer, window installer, or whatever you can think of. We’ll give the YegHelp cause $10 for each one.

If you’re going to be around Edmonton on May 15th, get your ticket to the Event at Lux Steakhouse. There are going to be some great prizes, and silent auction items, and I suspect there will be a bit of bacon served.

Posted by BrianS

One of HomeStars community is performer in 2010 Olympics

Ravi Bansal, the marketing and business development director at Save More Plumbing and Lighting, one of our Vancouver HomeStars community was invited to perform at the Vancouver Olympics. In addition to her role at Save More Plumbing, she’s a big community contributor as well as a talented dancer.

Save More Plumbing and Lighting, while they still haven’t got a review from a customer yet, have recently joined our community. They are very excited to contribute to the Olympic spirit in Vancouver and decided to support the cause by buying a whole lot of the Olympic Wine from Jackson Triggs, and giving it out to clients and friends. (we’re still waiting for our bottle!)

They also have a bit of an Olympics special going on, as posted in their Savings Page.

We always love supporting growing, entrepreneurial companies like these. Save More Plumbing and Lighting has won the Consumers Choice awards for a number of years (can anyone tell me which consumers choose these things?) and we look forward to them really being chosen by their own consumers next year with great reviews and winning the Best of ’10 Vancouver awards – and maybe across Canada!

Go Canada!

Posted by BrianS

It’s January – What are people searching on HomeStars?

At HomeStars we keep close track on what people are searching for on our site. In the spirit of sharing with our users we thought we’d let you know the top searches in January.

It seems that in January there were plenty of plumbing issues with “Plumbing” taking the top spot and “Plumber” taking 11th. Despite the cold “Roofing” took second spot and “electricians” took third. It got cold enough during the month to put “Insulation” into 4th, and people were obviously thinking about their heating as “Duct Cleaning” took 5th spot.

Here’s the full top 20 list:

Posted by BrianS

HomeStars Community raises $1768 toward Haiti Relief

As we all know Haiti has been devastated by a massive earthquake and over 1M people are now homeless. The HomeStars community pitched in during the recent Best of Toronto awards and the Best of Hamilton awards to contribute to the cause.

For these events we asked attendees to donate money as part of coming to the events as well as asking at the event for donations. HomeStars matched all funds raised, and, as we are donating through World Vision Canada, the federal government, until Feb 12th was matching all those funds again.

As builders, many of our community know how much work it will be to bring the country back again. It’s going to be a long, hard road.

We’d like to give a great shout-out to all who contributed with special mentions to Serge from All County Aluminum, Robert from Capps Duct Cleaning, and Andy from Finewood Custom Millwork who went above and beyond.

If you didn’t get a chance at the event and you’d like to make a direct donation to World Vision Canada, please click here and give generously.

Posted by BrianS