This is a paid review. As usually all opinions are my own.
I was asked to review the site "CouponChief.com". Normally I do couponing articles on Tired Garden, but I was asked to do it here, so I am going to stick to the more technical points in the review. I will be looking at site layout, specifically ease of use and technical usability of the product.
First we look at the layout. It has a simple, feminine layout. The colors are neutral, without being boring. The baby blue gives a good mommy feeling while the orange accents warm it up a little. Very inviting. This is about the best color scheme and layout I have seen for a coupon site. Simple, clear and inviting. Always good. A little feminine for my taste, but they are marketing more toward women. But not all couponers are female!
The important part. Ease of use. I'm a huge couponer. I love to save money and coupons do that. When looking for a coupon for something, you usually already know what you are looking for, so what do you want to do? Search for a coupon. You don't want a whole lot getting in the way of that search ability. CouponChief has placed the search bar front and center. It is over-sized and clearly labeled so you can easily find it.
If you are looking to browse (why not?) they are a little more limited. You can browse by store name, in case you can't find them in the search, or maybe don't remember how to spell it. Or if you are just a little sick and want to read all 1500 stores they have in the database. You can't browse by category though. On the main page is a "popular tags" section and you can browse those. Also if you search and find a coupon, you can look at related tags, but I don't see much of a browse hierarchy anywhere on the site. Is this a downfall? I don't know. So few places use browse hierarchies anyway as tags are simpler. You are mostly just going to want to search. And you can search by the tags.
The one downfall I see in usability, which CouponChief shares with other such sites, is that the description is often limited. They only have the title and the coupon code. Like I said, everyone does it this way. I'd still mark it as a fault though, because that is one way that CouponChief could have been better. Being user driven, those descriptions would have been up to the users, which may not be that great.
The users are the ones that state if the code worked or not. This is great, as otherwise you will have codes sitting there forever without anyone knowing if they work. I've gone through dozens of codes on other sites looking for one that worked. Here if it doesn't work, I mark it as "no" and then hopefully the next person will not have so much trouble. The site the code is for is opened in another window and CouponChief sits there patiently waiting, asking if it worked or not. This means people are more likely to say that it didn't work, if it doesn't. Great feature.
They have chosen to go simple. The nice thing about keeping it simple (KISS) is that it loads fast. The main page has at least 5 different database pulls, and still loads in just a few seconds. They also have affiliate programming so that you can get paid to add coupons. CouponChief gets paid when they make a sale, so you do too. Again, they kept it simple. I hope you don't want much information on the coupons you submit. They show you the date you submitted it and your success rate. I assume they will show you how much you have earned, but I don't see that anywhere. Perhaps they went too simple here?
The "Does it work?" code is perhaps their best technological front-end code. It is simple, but does a very important piece of cleanup. Does it still work? Simple, elegant and it works.
I have one request of CouponChief. How about an Andriod App? If they did that, they would also need to do an iPhone App, I suppose, but I just want to see the Android App.
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