Ask HN: Please Review My New Site.

http://www.drinkingfor.com

by spoiledtechie • 18 years ago

23 49 18 years ago

I don't expect to make money off this site, but I do hope to make some headway as my first true website...

Let me know what you all think. Its a Drinking site which will one day bring all the drinking activities together hopefully.

pavel_lishin• 18 years ago

Trying to upvote a game didn't do anything - the number didn't change, I didn't see any message telling me something went wrong - just nothing.

At that point, I got bored and left.

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

Gotcha, Only logged in users can up vote. Don't want abuse of the system. Will have to display a message that says something like that,

whiter4bbit• 18 years ago

actual:)

teej2• 18 years ago

Definitely an interesting idea. Here's a few things:

- Iterate on the design: I'd start on the color scheme, since it's easy to get right. Resources: http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html http://beta.dailycolorscheme.com/

- Random design tip: Please don't use a grey gradient on everything. It looks like everything has a layer of virtual dust on it. Try black or white, and then tweaking the transparency/opacity of the gradient down to 25-75%.

- Maybe I'm alone, but I never really thought tag clouds were a great data visualization. Regardless, I think another way to explore the games is worth pursuing. Example: http://www.extratasty.com/recipes

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

All points taken and noted.

Where did you see Grey Gradient? You talking about the voting system?

teej2• 18 years ago

The DrinkingFor.com logo at the top and the bottles on the left side

mkuhn• 18 years ago

i like the idea to get creative ideas :-) a few suggestions:

- i would not only display a tag-cloud on the homepage but also top games.

- why do you need people to log in / "register". wouldn't a captcha also do the job of avoiding spam and make the log-in/providing personal data optional. i think it makes it more likely people would contribute

- categories might could help people to navigate / provide contributers with suggestions how to classify their games. it also enables to "surf" the site.

- i don't dislike the design but i would make the navigation a bit more dominant and combine the two logos, combine the picture of the bottles and the title

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

Thanks. I will talk with my designer about that.

rudyfink• 18 years ago

Yeah, I second categories. I think there should be a few: top games, type of drink, by game type (movies, speeches, skill games, etc), size of group.

oakmac2• 18 years ago

I would change the text: "If you do decide to drink, DO NOT Drive. Drink Safely." to simply "Always drink responsibly." and have that section of the text be a link to a new page with a paragraph about drinking and driving. You also might include some external links on that page (MADD, AA, etc).

It is more direct to use a command instead of a conditional and use a positive instead of a negative.

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

point noted. Will do.

JoelSutherland• 18 years ago

It is worth noting that "Always drink responsibly" is the alcohol industry's PSA slogan. It was almost certainly chosen because it contains "Always drink" as opposed to being effective. This is why you see it in industry supported ads instead of the MADD ads.

silentbicycle• 18 years ago

Good observation.

oakmac2• 18 years ago

The industry may have created that phrase in a conveniently ambiguous way; still, in English, positives are always better than negatives when giving a command. Consider the difference between "I don't eat junk food" and "I always eat healthy foods." The first contains the proposition that you have the capability of eating junk foods; the second does not.

Perhaps "Always Drive Safely" or "Always be Responsible" as the link text would be better?

lacker• 18 years ago

I completely agree that the message "Always drink responsibly" is focused on escaping legal problems while getting customers to drink more. That said, this site has exactly the same goals as the alcohol industry - to get their clients to drink more, and use this product in conjunction with that drinking. So, perhaps "Always drink responsibly" is actually what they want.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

I think that no such message is necessary, period.

icey• 18 years ago

The layout seems like it's missing something to me. The tag cloud block is too short vertically maybe? I kept waiting for something to load under it, and it never did.

The other option is to put the tag cloud in a column on the right and make a center column where you can have a featured game or something? You know, to put some content on the front page.

Anyways, it seems like a cool idea - good luck!

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

Thanks,

I will be putting a top ten games voted on kind of thing at the top.

I also want to put a BIG BUTTON for the ADD a Game...

Hopefully that should fill it out a little.

pclark• 18 years ago

whats in the light blue box on the right? adverts?

remove it, make the content wider.

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

There will be adverts there. Wanted to get the site filled out a bit more before I place advertising.

bemmu• 18 years ago

My attention was drawn to the tag cloud first, and that made me confused as to what the site was about. Only later I noticed there was a description on the left.

Personally I am also a bit skeptical of the usefulness of tag clouds. It seem to me they are mostly interesting to techie types who like to think about raw data. I would rather see some specific examples of recently hot drinking games from the site.

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

Working on a Top Ten list for the games.

jdrock• 18 years ago

Agreed.. did not like the tag cloud. I don't trust it to direct me directly to the games I'm interested in.

Silentio• 18 years ago

Same experience here. I'd rather look at a list.

dgabriel• 18 years ago

Totally agree. Featured games, plus (possibly) photos of college kids (your friends, i'd assume?) playing the featured games, possibly a video...

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

Maybe do something like a video service?

axod• 18 years ago

The "Drinking For.com" is only half visible in Safari. (Can only see top half of it).

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

thanks, will look into.

tutwabee• 18 years ago

The background color of the logo is gray in IE6 and the Add Game page is messed up in IE6 also. Although, I can't blame you if you aren't planning to support IE6.

Also the OpenID button does not load in Opera 9 and slows down the loading of the rest of the form greatly.

guruz• 18 years ago

http://browsershots.org/ is your friend.

enra• 18 years ago

Same with Chrome

jordanf• 18 years ago

Nice man. Black text on blue is hard to read for me, though.

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

suggest another text color? I was wondering about that too.

moxy• 18 years ago

I can't say I'm too fond of the color scheme. However, I left the site feeling impressed, primarily because I'm quite fond of the site's purpose.

It might be beneficial to replace the tag cloud with something a bit less abstract and considerably more specific -- possibly even a "recommended games" or "top games" page. Though you could always use the tag cloud to supplement the interface.

noahlt• 18 years ago

When you click a tag and see a listing of activities, the headers ("equipment" and "rules") are inline with the text. Where it should read like:

  Equipment
    foo bar and baz
  Rules
    blah blah blah.

it looks like

  Equipment foo bar and baz Rules blah blah blah.

That is hard to read, and ugly.

Also, the colors aren't so pretty.

Neat site though. Clever premise.

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

The problem with this is users are allowed to enter in data so I will never be able to control what is in the site and not.

GrandMasterBirt• 18 years ago

Very non-standard navigation up top, but not so bad, I actually like it since it is so simple.

The site looks nice. What would make sense is that the 1st page is the description up top, then tag clound. Every other page has the description on the side.

eduardoflores2• 18 years ago

- Let users add photos/videos - Make design more fun, cheerful, drunken... - Maybe link to social networking sites

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

We are looking into it.

The thought on this tho would be after we are finished building the site where you can put games, would we want to expand it or move on to another idea...

Once all the problems and bugs have been fixed, do we stay and develop on it for another 3 or 4 months or do we move on?

eduardoflores2• 18 years ago

I would move on... don't see too much future on this idea only, as fun as it is

Allocator2008• 18 years ago

I appreciate the fact that there is a disclaimer about not drinking and driving. Perhaps one could further add a disclaimer that once one gets into the order of a dozen or more shots in a single night, one runs a risk of dying from alcohol poisoning, and that can happen with these kinds of "drinking games", so sort of a "proceed at your own risk" link might be appropriate and link to a medical article on the subject.

unalone2• 18 years ago

It seems like a fun idea, but it doesn't feel fun. I think the tag cloud is detrimental. It makes drinking feel like work.

The logo doesn't appear in Safari, as was noted.

Beyond that, this feels like you could have much more than drinking games on the site. There aren't enough drinking games to make a directory seem worthwhile unless you're adding some other features to the site to make it seem big.

spoiledtechie14• 18 years ago

I was asking my self the exact same question. Should I just put drinking games and move on or should I build up the site more. I don't know how much real type of advertising I can get with this site so I was thinking it might just be a waste of time to put more into the site. What do you think?

unalone2• 18 years ago

Well, I'm guessing you'll be using this site, so just figure out what works! Off the top of my head I'd think of either putting drink recipes online, or letting people talk and tell stories about each game, making it a bit more social. But it's your site, so I'd figure just make it whatever you want and if you like it, other people will too.

latortuga• 18 years ago

Typo from the About page: "If your still reading this..."

brent• 18 years ago

"We are here to provide a source of entertainment for any sort of drinking game/activity. We wanted to provide the best place to find any activity for drinking so feel free to look around and add a game/activity or two."

This is not as concise as it should be. Cut it down to like 7-8 words.

aptimpropriety• 18 years ago

I'd remove the need for a log-in to vote on games. Regardless of 'abuse', which should be relatively easy to monitor, if someone feels particularly passionate about up-voting, perhaps they should be able to express it.

Considering a large percentage of individuals who play such games are likely underage, who would want to log-in and, essentially, confess to their crime?

In my experience, sites like this which are 'cool content' driven depend heavily on equally 'cool' design. Perhaps consider design overhaul, find a friend good with web design?

rksprst• 18 years ago

It's nice to see a fellow asp.net website. It also looks like you're using the mvc beta. Though, the site could use a designer.

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