Building CodingDictionary.com

The last two months I been building codingdictionary.com. Which has simple explanations of coding terms in under 255 characters and users can add terms, like/dislike terms or save them for later reading.

So what tech was used?

Laravel – I been using this framework quite a bit since I really like it, so i ended up building this site with laravel.
Bootstrap – This helped me get a quick and simple layout for my site while looking modern.
ajax – Used ajax for parts of the site such as saving likes/dislikes to the database without having to reload the page.
**jQuery **– Used on the site a bit in parts such as keeping character count on the add word page.
Heroku – Helps cut out the work of maintenance of a server by my self.

What I Should Have Done Sooner

Feedback

I got a good bit of useful feedback from posting to reddit that I can take on-board to improve CodingDictionary.

I made the mistake of nearly having CodingDictionary fully build before asking for any feedback from anyone, if I got feedback sooner  I could have made the changes as I build the site instead of going back later. One bit of feedback I got was to make the urls cleaner, below is the current way the url for terms will display:

codingdictionary.com/term?w=Loop

Url is cleaner:

codingdictionary.com/term/css

but since there is many pages already indexed in Google, its better just to leave it the old less clean way.

If anyone has any more feedback I would be more than happy to take it on board.

Promoting

A big mistake was leaving the promoting of Coding Dictionary on till I had built the site. As you can see i submitted it to a limited number of sites:

Hacker News – I visit this site nearly everyday, so decided to submit my site to hacker news, which helped me get a good few people to use Coding Dictionary.
Reddit – I submitted this to webdev which got me a good few people to start using my site.

The problem with leaving the promoting so late is that some sites had a waiting list to submit your site such as Product Hunt (ps if anyone has access to submit, please help me out by submitting Coding Dictionary for me 🙂 ).