Web designers and new website owners tend to spend gobs of time scrutinizing the homepage of a new site. In my opinion the homepage (at least for a site like ours) is not that important. These are the reasons why:
1. The homepage is rarely the entry point for visitors to a website. Web sites are [...]

Dan and I came up with this idea to start a collaborative creative writing website where users can vote for the next part in a story. So we have spent several hours of our free time developing this application and now we want to get people to use it. In order to do this we [...]

Our Database makes me nervous.
I mean, it’d be fine for a blog or a picture hosting site, but because of the format of the database, we could easily expect hundreds of thousands of database records within 6 months. I am not a Database Administrator, and don’t have much interest in learning about building a MYSQL [...]

Votepages is a creative writing game where multiple writers work together to create something. Working with lots of data input, votes, users, multiple interface, etc. means that we have must have thorough directions. In order to give people guidance and hopefully ease some confusion that may arise I have created a help section for the [...]

We’ve been adding links and images to the app lately, and are moving closer to wrapping things up on the testing server.  We are going to be hosting using the awesome Elastic Compute Cloud supplied by Amazon Web Services, so I’m pretty sure if there is a sudden jump in usage, we’ll be able to [...]

Whenever I start a website (I have tried a few) I have always tried to find a good domain name. In this case “votepages.com” was the best choice. We were also considering “scriboodle.com” but votepages.com won out in the end. I have also been working on the overall look and feel of the site. I [...]

What does it mean to launch Votepages in “Beta” for us? The website that we have made is highly interactive, social, and pretty complicated. It involves creative writing, voting, submitting, publishing, lots of interactivity. This system is about as complicated as any other social application out there like Facebook, Friendster, or blogger.com, etc. So we [...]

Here’s a quick history of the development of the project. At the time of this post, all development for this project has been done in free time, before and after our “real” jobs. There wasn’t a concentrated effort by a team of developers, it was Tim and me working it out.
When I first started in [...]

This is the first post of the votepages.com blog. My brother Dan and I are keeping this blog to keep a running history of our attempt to start this creative writing website. We would like to document the entire process from a web development standpoint (mainly Dan’s arena) and business development (my arena). More entries [...]