The site was built with two people, myself and my partner over roughly 8 months. I did all the design/frontend while he handled all the programming.
We'd love to hear any feedback you guys/gals have.
http://wantsthis.com
The app seems nice, although there seem to be some minor rendering issues when viewed in FF 3.5.5 on Ubuntu 9.04 (the text in the 'sign up free' box gets a bit out of the box). However, there were other bugs - when I searched for a 'linux t-shirt', the 'next' arrow dissapeared at one point (there was a circle in it's place suggesting that it's loading). I then refreshed the page, and the previous item I added to my list appeared twice. I didn't review it any further, though, so I don't know if there are any other bugs. Hope this helps.
Also perhaps indicate on the direct purchase links (images in the top products lists) that they are buy links.
Like your login box.
2. Signup is easy and low-stress (no "how am I obligating myself" qualms).
3. Bug: before I signed up, I clicked one of the suggested wants, and I typed in a want. Then I registered. But in my registered persona, only the typed-in want was on my wish list, the clicked-on want had disappeared. Probably an edge case.
4. It looks like you make your money when buyers click on your Amazon affiliate links for the wanted objects. I wonder if you might make a little more money if you also put an explicit Amazon affiliates box/widget on the side, with a list of related objects?
2) That was important to us, glad it came across that way.
3) Thanks, looking into it.
4) We have a number of affiliates including Amazon, hopefully with more traffic we can expand. We are also looking into recommendations and price matching directly related to affiliates.
The amazon.com price comparisons are a little annoying to me, though, because most products don't ship internationally from Amazon.com. Not only that, if I'm entering prices that are in CAD$ and price comparisons are from a site (Amazon.com) that sells items in USD$, the price comparisons don't add a lot of value. It'd be nice if there was a way to set a locale to get price comparisons from. That way, you'd still be able to earn affiliate income, but even more than before because it's more highly targeted to the user.
the auto-generated name thing is a great idea, but I wonder if you could increase the conversion rate by replacing the copy "Create an account now, so you can choose a better name for your wish list!" with the form itself. That copy makes it seem as if I need to register in order to select a name, but in reality selecting a name (and making a password) is the registration process.
one question: are you only pulling products from amazon and newegg currently, and if so, plans to expand?
The Preference checkboxes at the bottom of /settings.php don't appear correctly on Chrome.
2. The grey boxes and text-shadows combine to form some really unreadable text
2. Very true, I'll switch that to something more user friendly