I've spent all my time recently developing this blog and ironing out any flaws, that I've completely forgotten what it was I was supposed to be developing in the first place. I know I originally coded this blog so I could talk to people about our ideas and progress so far, but progress towards what, exactly, has escaped me.
In a desperate bid to remember what the hell I'm up to, I did what any webmaster would do - Check the forums! (And no, these aren't the Drugs Discussion Forums, these are the Coffeesh0p.org Secret Forums!) I happened across a few interesting bits of information which I thought I'd share with everyone today.
Idea #1: Autocomplete Searching - When we were looking at all the other drugs information sites out there, we (and everyone else we asked) found that actually finding the information about a particular substance was a bit of a pain in the arse. TalkToFrank is a visual nightmare, not to mention takes a while to load on a slow connection, since it's flash. Erowid's front page looks quite nice and dynamic, but again, navigating from that page and sourcing out the drug you're after requires too much effort. And it's exactly the same for Lycaeum. So what's going to be different about Coffeesh0p.org? An Autocomplete search feature, that automatically suggests the drug you might be searching for. You can see an example at the top of this page, if you're using Internet Explorer 7 or FireFox - Type in "salvia" or "seeds", for example and see what happens. For Coffeesh0p.org, this will be incorporated into the massive database of drugs information we'll hopefully have accumulated. The rationale behind this is that you arrive at the front page, type in about four letters of what you want and BAM, the exact thing you're looking for is staring you in the face.
So, by next week, I hope I'll have a bit more of an idea of what's going on, and write about another one of our ideas.
Sounds like this could end up being a cool site. However, I think you really need to think of a fundamental change or improvement over Erowid and others. Simply adding little things here and there to make the site more user-friendly won't set your site apart enough to grab a significant share of visitors, IMHO. Another thing you could do make your site stand out is have a very interesting and fun navigation. Maybe you could say focus on psychedelic drugs and your site could be like a trip to navigate. Clicking on all these obscure image links, kind of like a maze, completely unconventional... I bet you could do some cool stuff with your expertise in Javascript and PHP. Personally a site like this would be awesome for drugs, because one the main reasons I got so into Erowid was because of its layout and organization, which is relatively unconventional compared with other sites, however I think it could be taken a lot further.
Good luck, I cant wait to see what you come up with.
ByJohn Clarke on 17/10/2007 - 9:05 Rating: Unrated
Hey Paradoxic, thanks for the input.
I definitely agree that a few little tweaks to make things more user-friendly won't bring in droves of visitors, but we'll be tweaking more than just a few things. In fact, I have a great many ideas that are unique to the Coffeesh0p.org project - all of which I'll keep secret until I post about them publicly here. Just as a taster, these ideas are split into two groups - usability and search engine optimisation, and both kick the ass of any other site out there to date. It's also going to be a lot more community-orientated than anything we've seen so far.
Nice idea, by the way. Unfortunately, I'm rubbish at graphics, so anything remotely psychedelic would prove impossible. We do however, have some interesting ideas for navigation, so stay tuned for more updates in the near future!
