Ask HN: Please review my weekend project: a dating website for dogs
plentyofdoggies.com
plentyofdoggies.com
Also, you don't have any traditional method to contact you (just facebook and twitter). An email address would be nice.
One question is why dogster.com, who was clearly the leader, shifted direction towards being more of a portal and less of a dating site.
The design is nice, but has a little bit of a "thrown together" look: the different things on the page don't really seem like they belong together.
I'd recommend a few things:
1. Align the logo of the site to the left (aligned with the text below).
2. Since I assume your subscription form at the bottom is not the most important thing, I'd make it much smaller, and move it to the right (someplace more out of the way). Where it is now, it looks like it should be the login form.
3. On that note, I'd move the login form to where the subscription form is now, and make it much bigger. Also, I'd probably make the "new user" link even bigger than that, since you'll mostly be getting new users for now. I'd probably make it a separate, very large, "call to action" button, and center it in the screen (ala Drop Box).
4. Last thing: I don't know what plentyoffish.com is, and that's in the first sentence of your site. You really don't want me leaving your site first thing.
This may come out as a dog-owner dating site :)
I think you underestimate how breeders work. They have a huge network in place and in most countries there are national organizations aimed at "dogs finding love". :) You know, pedigree and all that jazz. There may be a market for this, but to cater to it you'd have to be much less cute and more professional.
And while on the topic of actually getting offspring from this "love", it might not be such a good idea to have any random Joe off the street get the idea to have "ooooh puppies!" and then down the line realize that having eight of them at eight weeks old is ... actually quite the job (and at this point things get nasty).
Add to that that some dogs just should not breed due to various weaknesses, excessive inbreeding in the past yada yada.
That was a tangent, but to respond to poster: dogs/owners running around having a playmate for a few hours, great. :)
Everyone knows it's not for doggie breeding, most pets are spayed or neutered.
Of course when a single female cat can make over a dozen kittens per year, this is still not high enough to avoid the obvious problems.
But we don't have a wild-dog problem here, leave a dog out unattended over the winter and it's pretty much guaranteed that it will be dead come spring. Cat's seem to do much better somehow.
Agreed that this site has some promise.