couchrated.com

In my previous blog post this->movie, I mentioned about working on a movie review site. I managed to complete the review site and have come up with a better name for it than this->movie.

Introducing, couchrated.com. couchrated.com will be the place where I post reviews of all the movies I watch. To start with I have only 2 reviews which are of Bruno and Transformers 2. As of today I am working on writing more reviews.

start to finish in 2 days

couchrated.com was my quickest website build, and I am really happy with the results. It took me around 2 days to build it, as of now it is running no CMS and has no server side programming language running behind scenes. XHTML and CSS and a bit of javascript is all it run on for now.

To make it much easier to manage in near future, I plan to integrate it with Wordpress, but it is still a plan in progress.

the process

I set myself a limit of 2 days over the weekend to finish the entire thing. There have been times when I have started to work on something and left it half way through just because it took me too much time. With this project I wanted it up and running as soon as possible.

I drew a basic sketch of how I wanted the design to look while listing the various sections of the page. Once I had this ready, I started Textmate and began coding the entire template without opening the browser. Once I had the style sheet ready with the html page structure, I started the browser and then developing each section one by one.

Lessons learned

• Pencil and Paper design are great to begin with

• Develop/code each section of your design, one by one. You will be surprised by new ideas you come up with through this process.

• Release soon.Release often.

• Too much planning is not always necessary

• Getting user feedback on initial product is great way to plan further.

Progress Plan

I have a few thing planned for couchrated.com and would love to hear your feedback about anything you would like to contribute.

- Integrate the design with Wordpress to help manage things better

- Write more reviews

- Movie Trailers

- Newsletter subscriptions

- Comments( Wordpress should resolve this)

- User movie rating system

- Guest contributors

- Review Contests

- Video Reviews

Have a look couchrated.com