Katherine M.

Here's a site that has a bit of catching-up to do. It's over-complicated, and some of its approaches feel spammy.

There are good things that it offers, such as its Top Secret hotel deals (although aren't these really the deals that it was supposed to be offering all the time when it was set up?), but there's also a lot of quite expensive stuff on the site, and the search can be fiddly.

I do use this site; I just feel like it needs to move forward. As the brand-leader, I'd like to see it going back to making really good offers. The good old days, eh?

This has transformed the way that I buy audiobooks. Audible lets you download a book per month, for a £7.99 fixed fee, whatever the normal cost of the audiobook would be.

I'm always surprised that more people don't use this - it's great for driving or doing the housework, and is genuinely good value. I'd love to see more books onsite, and it would also be great to be able to download samples, because there have been a couple of occasions when I've used all my credit up on books that are recorded by a poor reader, and so I can't follow them.

I'd also love to see an improved app - the current one doesn't always follow the chapters, and so it's difficult to go back and find a part of the book after you've listened to it.

However, this is a great site and there are loads of brilliant books to choose from.

I'm torn about this site.

It's a beauty site that's trying to take a fresh approach to shopping for cosmetics and makeup. They use magazine layouts to display the contents of the handbags of various beauty aficionados, with clickable links to the products they contain. They used to use this to sell a handful of brands; now, they're focusing on providing samples instead.

On one hand, I find this really compelling. The layouts are much more attractive than, say, Space NK, and I understand that they're trying to add a social networking aspect to the site, by encouraging customers to register the products they already have, and those that they'd like to have.

However, this is where it falls down, too, because I simply don't have time to commit to interacting on yet another site. This would be fine, but What's in my Handbag asks me to apply for samples, and it's a competitive process. Because I don't interact much on the site, I never receive any samples. Therefore, I can't be bothered to look at the site anymore.

I think this is a great idea that needs adjusting - the owners of this site need to realise that being an enthusiastic social networker is not the same thing as being a committed buyer of high-end cosmetics.

I just registered my meditation teaching business on this site. It's newly-launched, so so a bit quiet at the moment, but I wanted to add a review because I really liked the approach to creating 'storefronts' for small businesses.

I already have a website and a Twitter feed, but this format would allow you to set up a web presence through the site. It's got an integrated bookings calendar (when I tried to embed one of these in my site recently, it was either expensive or really complicated - this is dead simple) and allows you to put up images, products and services using pre-determined formats.

OneNear works by making you searchable in your local area, and also lets customers list tasks which you can bid for. I don't expect business to come to me in that way, but I can see how it would make it possible for students, etc to make a living from picking up small tasks from the site (one example I saw was picking up bags of clothes and delivering them to a charity shop).

I think this is a great idea for helping businesses to be searchable and to present themselves well online. Recommended.