We’ve changed the look a little bit of the ratings box. We’re trying to draw a little more attention to the ratings box on the both rate page and the browse page so that visitors will be more likely to rate and give everyone a better idea of who is the highest rated.

We have received some comments from both members and agencies that the rating functionality was not prominent enough and this is our attempt to fix it. You’ll notice now it has a black border and the background is white.  The white background helps when the rating is on a highlighted listing.

Filed under: Ratings by PrimeModeling Date 13 April, 2008
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Today we are rolling out a new feature–The Highlighted Listing.  The highlighted listing helps your profile stand out by giving your listing on the browse window a different background and different border.  This is a great, easy, and affordable way to draw more attention to yourself and your Prime Modeling profile.

To purchase a highlighted listing, login, then click on “Gain Exposure”.  From that page you can see how many highlighted listings you have left as well as purchase more.

This is our solution to a growing number of users that want to stand our from the crowd.  Modeling, like many things in life, is about differentiating yourself from others.  You want agencies to see you more and to see that you’re committed to promoting yourself and your career.

Filed under: Main by PrimeModeling Date 10 April, 2008
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In general, the modeling industry has its fair share of bad apples.  There are those willing and unfortunately even eager to take advantage of people.  We are 100% fully committed to the safety and well being of our members.  We try our best to provide a valuable service.  We connect prospective models with agencies interested in them.

While we try as hard as we can to police what goes on on Prime Modeling, we simply cannot monitor everything.  We do our best to check into agencies when they sign up to ensure that they are indeed real agencies and not scam artists.  We like to think that we do a pretty good job.  But because of the amount of members, agencies, and messages that use our system on a daily basis, we know we don’t catch everything.

Here are some tips to make sure that you don’t get taken advantage of:

• Be careful giving out personal information.  Agencies don’t need your social security number.
• Be very leery of anyone asking you to pay them.  ESPECIALLY if it requires wiring money to someone.  If someone needs you to wire money to them, it’s probably not a good idea to.
• If meeting an agency or rep of some sort,  make sure it is in a public place or a real office somewhere.  Modeling agencies have offices and do business during business hours. Make sure it’s legit and safe to protect yourself.

With this being said, we wholeheartedly believe that well over 99% of the activity on Prime Modeling is 100% legit.  We’re just trying to look our for you and for us.

Filed under: Main> Suggestions by PrimeModeling Date 9 April, 2008
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We’ve added another option on the contact us page to help facilitate more user interaction and suggestions.

When you go to the page, just click the listbox next to “Subject”, and then click suggestion.  Once that is selected, simply enter in your suggestion or comment in the box and send it off.

We hold our users’ opinions in very high regard and often times may change or enhance the site to accommodate user suggestions.

Filed under: Suggestions by PrimeModeling Date 7 April, 2008
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As some of you might know, we use Ajax pretty extensively on Prime Modeling.  We’ve found that it’s great for 2 reasons:

1. It helps the user experience
2. It helps prevent bots take advantage of our system

As we’ve grown and expanded our services, we’ve found a need for tweaks here and there. We’ve enhanced the message sending capability to be a little more user-friendly with the Ajax.  Now, when you press send, it will display a small loading picture so you know that it has been sent. A few users have commented that messages would get sent twice because they clicked send and nothing happened right away.  The new system should take care of it.

If you come up with any suggestions, feel free to let us know.

Filed under: Messages> Usability by PrimeModeling Date 7 April, 2008
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To make it easier for agencies to find models meeting a certain criteria, we’ve added the ability to have an RSS feed for the customized browse page.

To use this feature, simply use our advanced filtering techniques on the browse page to narrow the results down to the specific criteria you’re looking for, then just click the RSS link under the “Filter” button on the lower left side of the page.

This is just another way we’re trying our hardest to give users the features they are looking for.

Filed under: Main by PrimeModeling Date 7 April, 2008
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This may seem very obvious, but make sure to upload the best quality pictures that you have. People submit a surprisingly wide variety of pictures.

You want to submit the best quality pictures that you have.  Agencies are going to judge you based on your picture.  If it doesn’t look good–you won’t look good.

There are 2 important tips to remember when submitting a picture.

1. Submit a picture that has a good view of your face
2. Submit a picture that does a good job of accenting your better features.  Whether eyes, hair, smile, or a good part of your body, make that your pictures highlight your good features.

Filed under: Pictures> Suggestions by PrimeModeling Date 2 April, 2008
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It’s always surprising the types of profiles people submit. As you probably know, members can submit pretty much anything they want in the About Me and Experience section of the profile.

We try to stress as much as we can to be as professional as possible on these fields. Agencies look at these before they contact you for work. If they look at it and realize that you are unable to spell or use capitalization correctly, it will only hurt you. We’ve seen so many profiles submitted with horrible grammar and spelling.

Here are some tips to help make you look better and get more attention from agencies

• Use full words–Use “you” instead of “u”. Enter in information like you would on a paper for school
• Use correct grammar–Use sentences. Use commas, periods, and such.
• Use correct spelling–This speaks for itself
• Use capitalization and spacing–Use paragraphs and sentences with capital letters. It looks better and it’s easier to read.

Mainly, make it look good. Think about it–would you want to pay somebody to work for you that can’t spell? Probably not. No matter what you look like, people want to hire quality people–people that take the time to use full words and sentences.  The better your profile looks, the better you look, and the better we look.

Filed under: Suggestions by PrimeModeling Date 1 April, 2008
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When it comes to the ratings, we have 2 main goals.

1. Keep the ratings system as open and free as possible
2. Keep the ratings system as fair to everyone as possible

Balancing between these 2 is often difficult.  One always seem to adversely affect the other.  We have to prevent bots and unscrupulous users from manipulating ratings, but we also try to keep the system open so anyone can rate anyone at anytime.

This being said, we’ve had to tweak the ratings system a little more to prevent profiles’ ratings from being artificially inflated.  We can’t say exactly what we’ve changed, but it has to do with how many times a profile can be rated each day.  Our system tries to identify patterns in ratings that look suspicious.  And, as you can guess, if a profile gets rated 20 times more than the rest of the profiles on the site, it looks suspicious.

We always make sure everyone knows that the ratings system will always be open.  You will never have to login or sign up to rate.  But we have to balance this with other concerns to make sure the system is as fair as possible.

Filed under: Ratings by PrimeModeling Date 31 March, 2008
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We’ve been making a few upgrades to the site in terms of security. When we first were writing the code driving Prime Modeling, sure, we were concerned about security, but not overly concerned with it.

Over the last few months, we came to realize there were a few holes around. Some that allowed unscrupulous individuals to cause annoying problems. None of the holes were anything bad, but mostly just annoying little problems.

The last couple weeks have been spent plugging a few small holes to ensure an interrupted enjoyable use of our site. And, while no sites can be said to be completely safe, we’re pretty dang close.

Filed under: Main by PrimeModeling Date 30 March, 2008
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