Who was it that said ‘Nothing is constant but change’? Not sure, but he was a smart chap. True to those wise words your TrustedPlaces has just had its latest incarnation.

So what’s new?

Well you’ll have noticed that the navigation is now different. You can use the Explore drop down and get access to all categories, quickly add a review and come back here to this blog.
Also notice the bar on top of you window? That stays there permanently when you scroll down and gives you access to MyTrustedPlaces – an area with all your content, activity from your friends and much more. If you’re not a member yet, you can quickly create a free account or Connect with Facebook.

Quick reviews (or reviews ‘a la Twitter’)

We’re making one key change on the way you can share your view on places or quickly jot down a note of where you are hanging with your friends. You can now write a quick comment and update you status, just like you do on Facebook or Twitter. Our brilliant developers have written some clever stuff that looks into your note and checks if it matches any places. You can then match that note (using Locate) to a place and write a full review then and there or leave it for later. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to share your views and feel this is a great way to do that.

Earn £50

Finally, there is another important addition to TrustedPlaces – referrals. We’ve all been feeling the pinch lately and we’ve decided to do our bit to help. You can now refer a local business to our premium programme and earn cash. Speak to your favourite pub landlord, shop owner, restaurant manager or any other type of business owner/manager and let them know about TrustedPlaces. Send them an email with a link that you can grab here and invite them to join. Once they do that and they upgrade to a premium account for a year (which costs £199) we will give £50 to you and £40 of free advertising to them. We believe that this is a great way to support local businesses and give something back to the community that has helped us get to where we are now. Sign up to the programme here.

We’re really fired up about this latest release and hope you share the excitement. TrustedPlaces now gets 920,000 unique users every month and we still spend zero money on marketing. We want to thank everyone that has helped us along this journey (that is you guys, the people who continue to write and share those excellent reviews). A big shout- out also goes to our friends at caffeinehit.com who worked tirelessly on the new design.

Apart from what I explained above, you’ll notice plenty more other tweaks on the site and as always we’d love to have your feedback.
To finish off, let me say that we’re not really done with this release. Watch out for more changes coming up in the coming weeks.