Free T-Shirt for Beta Testers!

Tenporium will soon be entering into private beta and opening its doors to a limited number of people. We’ll need users to test-drive the site and help us iron out the kinks.  If you’re interested in participating and want to make a difference, you can sign up as a beta tester.  We’ll e-mail you the info when the fun begins.

Purpose of the Beta Test:

The purpose of the beta test is to receive feedback and see how people respond to what we currently have in place. We want to see if things are working the way they’re supposed to and fix anything that isn’t. We also want to hear what features you guys like, what sucks, what you’d like to see, and any other suggestions you may have. Ok that’s great, so what’s in it for you?

Benefits of Becoming a Beta Tester:

- PRIZE GIVEAWAYS: Limited edition Tenporium t-shirts and other cool stuff for active beta testers!
- Make a Difference: Help improve and shape the experience with your feedback
- Exclusive Opportunity: Be among the first to participate and contribute to the site
- It’s FREE

What is Tenporium?

Tenporium is a product review site that leverages social polling to determine the top ten products in various categories.

Brand

So with our name and concept solidified, we had finally established our identity.  It was now time to put a face to it all.  We needed a logo to represent our site.

It had to be fun and fresh, but most importantly unique and recognizable.  We engaged the services of a logo designer and went through numerous logo concepts. Here are some that were proposed:

All were rejected.

The revolving shopping doors in the shape of a Roman numeral X was clever conceptually, but aesthetically, the style was not what we had in mind.  We wanted something more curvy and rounded.  And it simply looked like two intersecting planes.

Not completely satisfied with any of these, we asked the designer to craft one more. He had saved the best for last and delivered his coup de grace.  None of the earlier concepts were a hit for us…until this little guy came along:

The Tenporium monster.  Courtesy of Nido.

The inspiration behind this was to represent “consume” for consumer products and the “monster consumes all” concept came to mind.  The connection was subtle and thought-provoking.  It was a brilliant angle.  And visually, it was simple, clean, and charming.  This air of simplicity and purity makes the logo identifiable and memorable.

To stay in tune with the logo, our tagline was just as simple: Consumer Driven. Feed the Beast.

It was short, sweet, and captured the essence of the site.  The double entendre was slick too.

Identity

What’s in a name?  We knew what to call our website, but what exactly was our website?

As a start, we had the original concept for a blog about top 10 things in general.  And after all, it was this initial concept that drove us to our name, but we weren’t sure if it was one we wanted to run with.

Who were we to blog anyways?  Why should only our wisdom be expressed as opposed to that of anyone else?  Doing so would be selfish and limiting, selling ourselves short as well as everyone else.  We wanted to provide a platform upon which anyone could provide their input and decide what the top ten things are.

With that thought, we decided to ride the web 2.0 wave. The site was going to be driven by user-generated content and collective intelligence.  We then decided to focus on a niche. Instead of doing top ten “things” in general for anything and everything, we wanted to narrow the scope.  But what top ten “things” were we going to focus on?  We turned to our name to help us define our niche.

We decided to play the game of word association again, but in reverse.  The first time we had associated words with our initial idea to come up with a name.  This time we wanted to see what ideas our name elicited.  So from the word emporium, the ideas that immediately came to mind were shopping and consumer products.  The scope of our site was quickly established: Top Ten Consumer Products.  Users were going to collectively determine the top ten consumer products in various categories and provide product reviews (user-generated content) while they were at it.

With that, our concept was solidified.  And there we have it.  Tenporium.

Check out the About section for a more detailed explanation.

Name

Ironically, we came up with our name before we even established what our site was going to be about. We had a name with no real identity. But the name actually gave us direction and helped us define the purpose of our site. So although we did things a little backwards, it really helped us move forward.

The initial concept was to just write a blog about top 10 things in general. It was going to be about anything top 10 with no particular focus. Playing a game of word association, the words that came to mind to represent these ideas were:

Enter words into the Name Generator:
Ten + Emporium = Tenporium

Ok, we didn’t need a name generator for that.

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