Consumer Brigade is a project sponsored by the great folk at Shopzilla and it’s a fantastic integration of a commercial platform (Shopzilla and Bizrate) with a first class blogging engine (WordPress) and a twist or two of integration between the two. Voila… shopping blogs!
The frontpage is clear, simple and tells new users exactly what they can expect from the site… namely lots of great shopping news, information and opinion… want to know what’s hot in shoes, look no further.
As well as the integrated login form, automated listing of blog by category and featured articles from across the site (all of this, incidentally, could be managed by a ten year old the CMS is so simple) if you take the time to scroll down the front page you’ll see random listings of featured bloggers, latest posts from across the site and latest posts by tag/category via our fantastic custom global tag cloud creator.
One of the main things about this project was the integration between the site and the Shopzilla Publisher Program. To do this we integrated multiple ‘blog categories’ reflecting the different publisher channels and available at sign up (or editable - as above) as well as allowing users to easily sign up for the program and have their own ads automatically inserted for them.
You could almost describe it as seamless 
The last thing we’ll make not of on this project is the theme work. Shopzilla - quite rightly, wanted to just have the one theme which they could test on for ad CTR / performance and so on.. but of course their users want to feel like they can customize their theme in a very unique way.
Hence, as you can see, the default theme options are out of this world… there’s the option to ruin with a left sidebar, right sidebar or both, to make them large or small, to edit the text size, upload (and crop) your own custom header and even change the font of the color scheme of the whole blog.
