Welcome to panels!
The first thing to check out is the video on the panels homepage, this will give you the quickest overview of what panels is about. If you want to sign up right now click here, otherwise read on to learn what makes panels awesome…
Craig Barnes, a founder of panels, talks about the origins of panels on his blog.
Hint: Think nutritional panels…
The main thing that sets panels apart is the amount of information presented to the user. You will notice below the main tabs that are presented to a reader. Everything from a company’s description to financial data to user reviews can be accessed all from within one panel, keeping the reader engaged with the original content. All the information a reader would need about an entity is displayed on one panel:
We populate our database with information about companies and organizations ranging in size from the largest public companies to the pluckiest startups. If you have a site/link you would like a panel created for please let us know.
- The Origins of panels
- All about the information
- What panels are available
- The Benefits of panels
- The Technology behind panels
- The Panel Roll
- Getting Started
Just like the nutritional panels found on food packaging, our panels have a consistent and predictable interface. The focus of panels is on the reader and making sure their experience is positive.
We have enabled the following main panels:
About – Basic company and contact info, URL, logo, and summary
Site – A full preview of the home page and basic site statistics.
Click on the ‘Statistics’ sub tab to see a full stats summary from Alexa, Compete, Panels, with more on the way!
Map – Get directions and everything else you would expect from a map tab. Beginning with Google Maps, other data sources are soon to follow!
News – This is an area we are expecting to update regularly. Currently we are aggregating headlines, blog posts, news, press releases and more from a variety of sources.
Jobs – See employment listings across numerous providers such as monster and simplyhired
Financial – If a public company, real-time financial info, such as quote, charts, etc. will appear in several sub-categories
Reviews - This is a very exciting category that will allow community members to interact with the business or organization by placing and reading reviews. If available Yelp reviews are integrated.
Shop – Much more than e-commerce… stay tuned for exciting news on this panel!
Site Search – Lastly, notice in the lower left hard corner of our panels, you can easily search just the target site right from here, with results opening up in a new window or tab. Give it a try.
Everyone benefits in the panels ecosystem; users, publishers, and yes even advertisers.
The panels interface combined with amounts of data presented make any blog significantly more useful for readers and more successful for the publisher/blogger/website owner because:
- Content is more engaging, readers do not have to leave
- Readers instantly get all the information they want
- panels are unobtrusive, all a reader sees is a small panels icon
panels is fully buzzword compliant… The panels themselves are AJAX, the back-end is LAMP, we pull in data through RSS among other things, and it takes one line of JavaScript to install panels on your blog.
Show off your passions with our panel roll widget. The panel roll makes a great compliment to a standard blog roll. A panels roll will show off the sites that matter most to you. Check out Craig’s Lemonade to see how the panels roll enhances his sidebar…
Getting signed up for panels is incredibly easy. To get started go to http://panels.net/register.php
Once you have entered your information and had your account activated its time to login and setup your panels preferences. The simple setup/configuration process for panels is illustrated below in 4 easy steps:
Customize your panel roll and let the world know what your interests are:
That is all it takes, 4 easy steps to more engaging content and happier readers!
This concludes our tour of panels, if you have any feedback, bugs to report, feature requests, or questions you can head to our community forum or message us on twitter.