So the sites have been up a few days and I seeded the site with the most frequently searched for terms according to google's keyword estimation tool (whose top 200 search phrases add up to over 500 searches per month), though none of the pages have much in terms of content.
Here's my tentative plan for the sites: (in no particular order)
- Find a graphic designer to help come up with a better UI/User Experience. I think people can tell the site was designed by a developer. The current layout came from a free MVC template from the MVC 1.0 Gallery of templates on codeplex. If you know anyone who can help with this, let me know, otherwise I might have to outsource to oDesk, 99Designs or Crowdspring.
- Implement a more robust caching strategy leveraging Azure's Caching.
- Add a related Twitter Tweets widget to the topics pages. (Started looking at their API's and they looked interesting), and may give some default content to new pages.
- Use Windows Azure Access Control Services (ACS) to enable login through Google and Facebook. Part of broader strategy to integrate the sites with Facebook via their API's. Plus already viewed the Pluralsight training on this, and looks pretty easy to implement.
- Change the Voting strategy of the site. In the interest of reducing friction for using the site, currently anonymous users can vote and submit. JavaScript cookies are all that prevent users from voting over and over again. Eventually I'd like to build a more robust solution, storing user votes in Azure table storage. Right now all the data is in SQL Azure, but depending on how this goes, maybe its worth moving other items into Table or Blob Storage.
- Create a "curator" role either for topics or tags, to allow notifications when content changes. Hoping to give users the ability to monitor the site. Also allow these users to modify content (answers, comments, etc)
- Add a set of FAQ pages
- Add RSS Feed Support for tags or topics.
- Figure out how to implement a robust search function and implement it.
- Leverage above mentioned search functionality to automatically identify and handle duplicate topics like google does with "Did you mean?". Maybe depending on the confidence level, display a page with similar sounding question instead of creating a new topic, like we do today, which I think is a cool feature for now.
- Figure out how to monetize the site. I was rejected from Adsense due to a lack of content.
- Come up with a better content strategy. I might end up finding a virtual assistant or someone to help seed the site with content.
- Build out a better deployment strategy. I've grown tired of waiting for all the servers to be updated whenever I deploy a new package. I've heard of quick web deployments using the Windows Azure accelerator for web roles, and it's something I'm thinking of looking once the pain has become too much. And as far as automated builds go, I'm looking of forward to seeing how it will fit together with git. Right now, I'm pushing all my code to bit bucket before every deployment as a practice and it's worked out nice so far.
- Create a catch all site, "OnceFound" to describe the purpose of all of this. Eventually the plan could be to acquire more domains and leverage the same technology, or perhaps allow others to use this technology to park question oriented domains (become a host).
Sounds like enough to keep me busy for a while.
If anyone else has any other ideas, let me know.