I would be very interested to hear more about the user Listnerd http://www.listnerd.com/Listnerd#lists and how Listnerd has created 492,988 lists and received 3,072,466 votes!
We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
81–90 of 138 posts
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course! The idea behind using preprocessors is helping you write CSS more easily. The goal is not to write obfuscated CSS, but rather to write CSS well! What it really enables (imo) is to think of styling in an Object Oriented way. Whenever you're about to write a block of Sass think "What is this thing?". The answer is almost never a "green button" but rather "getting started button". Or something like that. It a…
To clarify, for the `.buy-button` class, is that where one should put super-specific styles like `margin-left: 12px`? Also, is there a good place I can learn these kind of things? I'm a programmer trying to get better at CSS (SCSS now that we've setup the asset pipeline)—so far I've been reading random A List Apart and The Sass Way articles, but I feel like I could use a more holistic, in-depth understanding of CSS i…
I would take a look at BEM. It's methodology and set of naming conventions to help write better, more modular and reusable CSS. It can take a while to get used to, and to get it right, but once you do it's a lifesaver. I can't imagine doing front-end dev without it now
http://csswizardry.com/2013/01/mindbemding-getting-your-head...
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/16/a-new-front-end-m...
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#83I feel like I could have programmed this site in 40hrs, tops. Let's say someone with a few years experience charged $50/hr, that would be $2,000. You could probably at least halve that hourly rate on odesk if you wanted to.
Development doesn't work like this. You are assuming they knew exactly what they wanted in a fair amount of detail up-front.
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#84Nice try but all you'll get from HN is a bump on your analytic graphs and I bet not one real user.
Anyhow I wonder how you came into pouring 200k into this idea (or maybe this is a catch number to get HN attention). Did you do any sort of validation prior to that? FYI I'd built this whole site for 5% of that budget
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#85Why would I want to do this?
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#86I feel like I could have programmed this site in 40hrs, tops. Let's say someone with a few years experience charged $50/hr, that would be $2,000. You could probably at least halve that hourly rate on odesk if you wanted to.
Development doesn't work like this. You are assuming they knew exactly what they wanted in a fair amount of detail up-front.
Development can work that way or I can keep charging you for changes and stuff you have no idea if you will actually use because you have no game plan. But anyway, that's pretty much my point. The two founders are designers and one was also a developer of some sort. They spent 1.5 years outsourcing development, when if they knew what they wanted, someone could have pushed out their designs and functionality in a week, maybe two. Since he did mention other mechanisms such as indexing and scraping code, wordpress plugins, etc... (simple stuff). That would might add maybe a second week to my 1 week prediction.
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#87I call BS. This appears to be a new take on "Show HN"...trying to get attention. The site works, looks OK, and you appear to have users, so it doesn't really suck. If you thought the concept sucked, then you wouldn't have done the site in the first place. If this were a legit post, I would say this: I think this is a relatively crowded niche you're in. I'm also sure that you dramatically overspent if you actually spe…
plus one
As pointed out by those who have "made it," they faked it, lied and pulled any trick to get attention and users.
I say don't believe anything on the Internet!
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#88After clicking around on some of the lists to get a sense of what the intended content is, I think it suffers from a little bit of an identity crisis.
By which I mean that the base, bottom-feeding type lists are already supremely well-covered by every other slideshow/listicle media property (Buzzfeed, the "suggested" stories at the bottom of every news site), so it would probably be difficult to attract any meaningful marketshare.
Whereas the curated lists of items, or recommendations are all things I'd use Pinterest for. Being able to organize and customize the item information seems like it could be a competitive advantage for you (Basically on Pinterest, your options are: Make a board, put pins on it, maybe comment on the individual pins; there's no sense of "ranking").
And it sounds like you're sort of looking at Pinterest's revenue model, but their user growth is kind of crazy, so they might end up sucking up all the air of that particular vertical.
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#89The colors and font scream "Barney" (like, the old kids TV show). I think they could work if you desaturated one or both of them a bit and went with a font that was a bit less "fun".
Btw just to give a little bit of context, I thought I'd make a small mockup of what I mean: http://imgur.com/XqkMzUB
Basically, desaturated the two header colors a lot (still not perfect, but at least maybe it gives some contrast. I also ripped out the orange buttons and the redundant search box because they were garish and really hard to read. I also tweaked the fonts a little bit.
(Disclaimer: I am not a professional designer, these are just ideas so you can at least see what it would look like in an alternate universe).
Re: We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism
#90So I honestly never comment but felt moved to ask... What are you trying to test? What's the hypothesis you are trying to prove disprove?
You've spend 200k on a website which seems to function as intended, with a robust back end, and some comes tic issues.
Is your hypothesis: "will ppl make list for me (for free)?" "Do people care about lists"? "Can i trick people into making lists and for me to profit off their user generated content"?
I'm sure there is something far more worthy here but I don't get it.