Don't worry. Everything will be explained... In Season 72

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The first reveal: our website is going to be about food. Fat, greasy, ugly, pretty food. Anything that (a.) you put in your mouth, and that (b.) doesn’t get expunged from your mouth immediately–that’s our forte. Gum, too. Gum can be part of our forte. And lemongrass, I guess. And bay leaves.

The second reveal: our website already has a heapful of friends/enemies: Yelp, Urbanspoon, Food Genome, and Food Spotting. Just to name a few. We won’t necessarily despise these competing websites; instead, we’ll use them as models, and we’ll try to hit a niche (or a nerve) that these sites haven’t quite struck yet. Sidenote: the nice thing about the agile approach is that we don’t really have to pitch our website as something cool and completely new (e.g. “it’s like if DotNetKicks met Yelp in a bar, and Yelp cheated on DotNetKicks with WebMD in a doctor’s office”); we just have to pick a topic that we’re invested in. That’s it. From there, we’ll learn to develop the website alongside the needs and the desires of our slowly-accruing crowd.

The third reveal: almost all of the content on our website will be community driven, and, at least initially, it’ll be completely free. This one’s a no-brainer. We need content like Hurley needs a milkshake. And we’re too damn lazy to create all of the content by our lonesome selves, so we have to “employ” our end-users. And by “employ,” I mean (off the record): “trick them into indentured servitude.” Whether the site will stay free, and whether we’ll keep the indentured dynamic for years to come (I’m joking, of course)–well, that’ll depend on what we learn as the site matures.

The fourth reveal: one conversion will be equal to one page of user-generated content. Remember our metric from my last post? Now we have every piece of the puzzle that we need to make our metric as explicit and as idiot proof as possible. For a UGC-based site like ours, I think this formula is a pretty solid indicator of how much value we’ve accrued (in any given time period) on our website:

where v = unique view count
where l = average number of visits per unique visitor (loyalty)
where c = the number of pages created by users (units of UGC)

value = v * l * c

The fifth reveal: now that we’ve hammered out the details of our metric, and now that we have a generic site topic, we can finally start designing our website. Which means: in my next post, we’ll be doing some initial designing/doodling. And, after we’re done doodling–be patient, grasshopper!–we’ll start building our actual MVC application. Hurray!

So, let’s recap:

• We’ll use Asp.Net MVC to build our website.
• Our website will be shamelessly simple. You know, like a Lady Gaga song.
• Our website will be about food. And gum, bay leaves, and lemongrass.
• Our website will primarily contain user generated content (about food).
• Our website will have no more than four pages.
• We’ll build our website in less than one month. We better get started, eh?
• Our ultimate goal: to learn how to increase the value of our website by effectively influencing (and testing the influences on) our monolithic metric.

Onto Part 8: The Doodle Abides; Creating a Simple Conceptual Website Map.

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