GuildQuality

Late last week, we went live with some significant expansions to the Qlist — our directory of quality-minded building and real estate professionals. As part of our mission to elevate the stature of our profession to a level commensurate with its importance, we take great pleasure in celebrating and promoting our community of quality.

The Qlist is one of the ways we do that celebrating and promoting. Since we launched it in late 2006, it has quickly become the most frequently visited part of our website, and the significant majority of that traffic comes from consumers interested in finding the right builder, remodeler, or contractor.

Here’s a quick run-down of the recent enhancements:

First, we refined the member profiles themselves — both to make make them more attractive, and to accommodate the inclusion of project listings (see below). Here’s a snapshot of a Profile with lots of content (click here to see a sample profile).

Second, we introduced Listings. Listings enable members to show off their homes for sale and/or examples of their work. Every member gets one Listing at no charge, and there are additional nominal fees for including multiple Listings. You can read all the details in the Qlist section of your account “Preferences”. Here’s is an example of a Home for Sale (click here to see a sample listing).

And the last major change: welcome Canada! We’ve been providing customer satisfaction surveying for a number of Canadian companies for some time. Now our map reflects it. As of this writing, just one Canadian member has “opted-in” so far, and I hope more will do so once they read this news.

People have asked, “What influences the default sort order of members in the Qlist?” We wanted the Qlist to “reward” members with more prominent placement as they include more information in their profiles. So the more content you provide (i.e. Logos, Affiliations, Company Description, Customer Comments, etc) the more likely you are to show up near the top of the list. We expect that Listings and the photos in each listing will be especially interesting to the thousands of consumers that visit the Qlist, so their inclusion in your profile gets you an extra bump up as well.

Creating Listings within your Profile is easy. But if you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us.