Overview
This is what I consider my first idea on the web that I thought of and pursued. It is what started my push into more substantial web development and I consider it to be one of the most important steps into how I got to where I am now. Freshman year of college, I did what no other college freshman does (sarcasm), and bought a guitar and learned how to play. As I started playing I found that it was often frustrating to find both the guitar tab and the lyrics without having to go to two separate sources. Hence the idea of creating a go-to source for both.
Why was this New or Better than What’s Currently Available?
This was a very saturated area to be getting into. There were literally dozens upon dozens of lyrics sites on the web. But being the optimistic (the real word is naive, but we’ll go with optimistic) young buck I was, I thought I could do it better. Had I actually followed all the way through to the end of the road, I still do believe however that the final product would have been better than what was being offered at the time.
Pop the Popups
The first and most overwhelming reason the site would have been better was simply NO POPUPS. These days it may not seem like a big deal, but during this time, if you wanted to find lyrics for an artist you would have to battle through a sea of popups. A popup would appear everytime you went to a new page, any time you left a page, practically anytime you even thought about anything else othe than the popups you were trying to close Despite this being my first start-up project, it is a relief to know that even early on I recognized a major part of a start-up’s foundation: Focus on Your User’s Happiness.
So instead of 9490390482 popup advertisements, I would just have 1 banner on the bottom of the page. More revenue would be driven from referral sales, and integrated marketing of up-and-coming artists and albums. I would let the users surf free.
Personal Features
The other major feature was personalization. A log would be made of each visitor when they came to the site and it would be accessible via dropdown on every page. This way when a user came back to the site, if they wanted to jump right back to the lyrics they looked at yesterday, they would simply select it from their history dropdown. When I was the emotional teen who needed to know the tab of that Box Car Racer song I was trying to play, I would go back to the same site over and over while I was working on it. It wasn’t important enough to bookmark, but it would have saved time to just jump back to what I was looking at previously.
In addition, the user would be able to define favorite bands and songs, also accessible via a dropdown. Together, the dropdowns would provide a much more personal, and efficient approach to the lyrics and tab site.
What I Did Wrong
The major failing point was simply being niave. I approached it with the attitude that most people who have ‘the next big idea’ have the first time: I said it would be easy.
I had it all worked out. Once I got the site going I wouldn’t have to do a thing. I would just have to count my money. It was so simple: Once the site was finished, all I had to do was make a script that ripped the lyrics off of existing lyrics sites and put them into my database. I said, it’s legal, the sites don’t own the artists lyrics. But after I got everything loaded in, then all the users would submit the lyrics themselves and I wouldn’t have to do any work myself! [Ooookay]
The project eventually succumbed to staleness. With my rudimentary grasp of PHP, the project simply took too long and too much time. And sitting on a computer was not the most social way to get through your freshman year of college. Unfortunately it wouldn’t just take one project to get me past the ‘It’s so easy, we’ll be rich soon’ attitude. But none-the-less I surged onto the next ‘big’ thing.
What Good Came of It
This project was the springboard for all of my future endeavours in web programming. To make the site I discovered PHP and started programming in notepad. It was my first experience using a server side script and I can still remember being astonished with the amount of potential that was unlocked when you can control and process dynamic output.
Not only that, but this site was the first step in popping the big ‘It’s so easy’ bubble in my newbie mind. It was the beginning of a long road.
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