Site I've been working on every evening for six weeks - ycnews feedback would be awesome

Site I've been working on every evening for six weeks - ycnews feedback would be awesome
clutu.com

This is the sort of concept that you infinitely play around with. Some ideas for your to-do list:

1. Widgetize it

2. I know its collaborative, but throw in a few features that cater to the solo user

3. Add in some kind of top-score list or top-user list and put on home page

4. Screen shot of game on home page

5. Allow users to pick games based on predefined categories and difficulty levels

6. Allow users to race against a clock to complete the puzzle if they want.

Random thoughts:

-I know I've been docked for saying this before, but a facebook app that ties in with your site might be a good way to virally grow the user base.

-My first reaction to the site's name was a play on Cthulhu: you might want to capitalize on that and make a (dyslexic?) cthulhu be the site's mascot.

-An idea for crossword generation is to take the top stories on reddit and make crosswords be based on key words (and their clues) from the stories.

It wasn't obvious to me that the anagram clues were anagrams. Woul it really kill you to spell out "anagram?" Maybe even put "Anagram:" before the clue instead of putting it in parentheses afterwards?

What's the point of the "play" button? Why not just give the user a puzzle right out of the gate?

The delete key should let me delete a letter, and probably go back to the previous letter.

There should be some way to choose the direction of my typing with the mouse when I click a square that starts both an across and a down arrow. For example, perhaps add a little "right" arrow and a little "down" arrow in opposite corners of the square that users can push? At the very least, if I'm entering a "down" word and I click a square in that word that's also part of an "across" word, it's confusing for it to switch to the across word.

Let people make their own puzzles. A really easy way to do this would be to simply ask the user to enter 40 or 50 word-clue pairs, which you could then assemble into a new puzzle. This might also be a source for new clue ideas.

Relatedly: let users rate clues. This will allow you to refine your database. Your rating options might be something like "Hard," "medium," "easy," and "unfair." Clues that get several "unfair" ratings could be automatically weeded out of the database. Once you had a substantial database of ratings for clues, you could offer puzzles with varying difficulty levels based on the ratings.