Introducing Best Seattle Bars

Posted on by

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!

  • http://sunilgarg.com/ Sunil Garg

    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.

  • http://goodmorningeconomics.wordpress.com jsalvati

    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.

  • http://www.alexloddengaard.com alex

    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!