Ask YC: Review my Website, Being Served from My Laptop Right Now - dev.trailbehind.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Review my Website, Being Served from My Laptop Right Now - dev.trailbehind.com

dev.trailbehind.com

This is awesome. Is that usgs data? Best representation of way points I've seen yet.

Yeah, the site includes a list of millions of USGS waypoints, along with other data we have collected.

It looks like your site might be useful for planning hikes and such except that I can't figure out how to get it to work. I think it's probably about 50% that I don't know how it works and 50% that the UI needs some polish, but besides that trailbehind looks like a good idea.

It'd be nice to hint about what you're offering before having to enter a zip.

I agree. There should be something indicating what this thing is, if nothing else a tag line that hints at what it is. I'm still not entirely sure what this is supposed to do.

When does it ask for a zip code?

In the search box when you first load the home page.

The button says "Find Trips."

How might it be made more clear?

By having a landing page that isn't just a giant map. You need to explain what your site does. As it is, I suspect most of your visitors will arrive and depart almost immediately.

We do have a bounce rate of about 40%, which is something we're trying to manage. I think part of that is not knowing what to do on the site, and part of it is because the site is really slow (until tomorrow when we launch the new version).

We're thinking about switching from a giant map home page to having the "Geo News" (in the main menu) as our home page, once the news page is polished.

Why not just use geo-location to pull up a map based on where the user is right now?

We'll do that eventually... it's just another feature filed in our bug tracker. It's not clear how valuable that is though, particularly on a US level.

The first goal for personal geo-location will be to show foreign visitors a world map.

It'll be nice that you deploy it somewhere with better bandwidth at this time it’s hard to try it.

Yeah, right now it's running off of Django's dev server, forwarding a port on my laptop through an SSH tunnel to my production server. So it's a little slow :)

I'm surprised it hasn't crashed under all of this traffic actually, since Django's dev server isn't threadsafe.

This is roughly what we are going to launch tomorrow. The current site is at: www.trailbehind.com

How about an Australian version. plese ==> looks great!

We'll be uploading some aussie data this month, if not this week.

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