We invite reviews of restaurants, other food outlets, clubs and bars & independent shops and boutiques throughout Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch. All reviews must be impartial and you should not be connected with the place you write about in any way. By submitting a review to us you grant a perpetual royalty-free licence for us to use all text, images, video and other material supplied in any format or medium that we choose. We also have the right to edit where we deem appropriate. Further terms are located in the Community Guidelines and the Legal Terms.

Reviews

Style – Your review should be written primarily for an audience of 20-40 year olds and should describe your experience, we do have a wider range of readers so please only use language that can be easily understood by all ages. Give the reader a feeling of the place and help them to make their own minds up about whether or not it would be something they would enjoy. Take into account the ambience, service, customers, décor, price and of course, the food.

Your audience will vary from those who enjoy the cheap and cheerful, to those who have a more discerning taste and appreciate the ambience as much as the fine food before them. Therefore, try to be objective and steer away from negative words and description, remembering that what is not enjoyable to you, could be to the reader. For example, just because you don’t like loud and lively student bars, others might. Try to give a feel for the venue whilst keeping biased opinions at bay.

Being Critical Be careful with your words, try to be honest yet diplomatic and base your visit on fact. For example, if you were waiting 1 hour for food you could say any of the following:

A)      The service is relaxed and laidback
B)      I waited 1 hour for food
C)       This place is slow and rubbish

Option A won’t offend anyone, but you could be leaving out an important piece of information the reader needs to know, i.e. that the service was slow.
Option B is factual; you are saying what actually happened on this single visit, thus telling the reader that this may or may not happen to them.
Option C is potentially slanderous. Giving a sweeping statement of a venue based on one visit is not only unfair, but could also land you in a lot of trouble!

Length – Please write around 450 – 650 words.

Photos Please supply between 5 and 8 photos including building, interior, ambience, food and anything else you think would be good. Your photos should be appealing and suitable for insertion with your text. When submitting using our Contribute page you need to keep your file size under 5MB so please send us scaled down photos and combine them all into one zip file. If your review is selected for publication we will contact you to arrange high resolution photo submission.

Credit As well as the great feeling you will get from contributing to make BHbeat.com better for all our readers we will always publish the name of the author (and an email address if requested) with every review.