w00t it is finally out of the door, for almost 3 months now I have been playing around with how to launch a strong upgrade to my existing cocktail making site. I have been told at times that the design is grade school, it doesn’t work in firefox, it isn’t very intuitive, it’s ugly and so on. All the while it’s been unattractive visits have climbed and I topped 1/4 million page views last month.
v1.0 launched in 2001 and simply consisted of a few hundred hard coded cocktails. In 2003 I upgraded the site to be fully user generated with approvals by me and this was release v2.0.
For this release, I have totally changed the appearance of the site, the cocktail list is pulled in a new way with far fewer lines of code and most of the key pages are now cached. The site also works again in firefox but the key thing is the code is now clean, self contained and fully rewritten. I have an architecture and platform I can finally expand and build on with new modules.
Over the next 3 months I am going to start adding some really exciting user functionality including membership of the site, site emails, the ability to store your bar and more.