Introducing Best Seattle Bars
Today is the official launch day of Best Seattle Bars! I made the site for a friend of mine, and I had a blast doing it. Features include:
- Interactive map of the best Seattle bars
- Popular neighborhoods
- Basic bar information (name, address, phone, and website)
- User reviews and a wiki-style description for each bar
- An RSS feed for review and description updates - check it out
Given that Kyle’s domain is pretty unbelievable, I wanted to make the entire site as SEO driven as possible. I have pretty URLs, and keyworded titles and headers. Kyle and I are hoping to get tons of organic search traffic, and we’re hoping that the RSS feed gets people coming back for more.
I wrote the site in PHP with a MySQL backend. Everything is inline, and I’m really glad I made the decision to not write good code. I’ve wasted too much time writing good code in the past. Eric did the layout and design - I think it took him 30 minutes.
Kyle has some pretty awesome ideas with this, so stay tuned for more updates. Enjoy!
3 Comments so far
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I feel like I need to force you to give Rails a try.
Feel free to borrow this book from me if you have even a half weekend to spare — based on this project and Helpd, I think you’d really enjoy it.
Oh, and first, watch this video.
1) Are you going to let people add bars (maybe with some sort of validation?)?
2) Are you going to have some sort of aggregate info for price/reviews?
3) After you get it running and a bit popular, you should get it to make money by charging bars to add their menus or be listed in general.
1) Eventually, yes.
2) Eventually, yes.
3) Good idea! Kyle has a few other thoughts, but this is a good one.
I suppose Kyle and I launched the site as almost an alpha. We plan to improve it a lot, but we thought it would be useful to people just the way it is now. Thanks!