Hookahwatch.com- planning stages

[Scalliwag]

I bought the domain name www.hookahwatch.com a while back with the original intention for vendors and consumers to use like a hookah version of www.pricewatch.com
Evanslight and I started going over the concept and he got busy with building some websites which has given me time to think up even more concepts for the site after listening to others ideas. Evans suggested a site for people to plan parties help make some lights flash on that as far as specifics on ways to implement that.

My thought at this time is to have 3 types of venues within the site. For the sake of separating the concepts I am calling the ideas “pricewatch”, “loungewatch”, and “partywatch”.


Pricewatch:
The concept for the Pricewatch side of things is a system that helps consumers locate hookahs, ma’assel (< that’s fer King Mo ) and all the related supplies. In addition to helping the consumers it should help retailers in letting them see where they are at with their pricing and if a wholesaler tries to unload a large amount of a particular product they would have access to find out what they could sell it for.
They would get access to demographics like the most popular searches.
Maybe even setup an area for wholesalers to post bulk items and only registered vendors could access.
As you can see there is a huge amount of things just in the “Pricewatch” concept alone and developing and implementing it will be a large undertaking. The post will be long enough without going into all the gory details right now.
For example, someone makes a new product can promote it to vendors there as well and work out wholesale pricing.


Loungewatch:
Owners: Lounges trying to kickstart their business would get some tools and advice here. Possibly connections to investors or potential partners. Help with legal questions and the ins and outs to help make decisions.
In addition to the business side itself they can promote their lounge even before they open if it is still in the building phase.

Customers: On the lounge page you could fill out a form that would give you options such as;
1) if a lounge was opening within a certain mile range you would get an email notification with a link to the details and a place to sign up for a grand opening party so the owners can get an idea of the interest and what to expect.
2) A checklist that you would get notifications of any parties of specials on your “Favorite Lounge” list that you create from a checklist with all the current lounges in the area.

Partywatch:
Planners: Think of this as something like www.evite.com Actually this page can give a great idea as to how that would sort of be setup. [url="http://www.evite.com/app/party/ideas.do"]http://www.evite.com/app/party/ideas.do[/url]
The form for planning the party would be very intuitive.
Partiers: Sign up for notifications when an open party is within a certain mile range from you. Receive notifications of any changes. Be able to see who is bringing what and putting in how many people you will bring and any food or whatever.

Of the three arenas the Partywatch should be the easiest to implement because there is a lot less involved and it can be implemented faster than the other two.
Loungewatch falls behind that, and Hookahwatch is the one that presents the biggest headaches.

Ideas for this are very welcomed. I think it will serve everyone involved in the hookah community because it offers things for everyone and preferably in a format that is easy to find what you want quickly.

[Thadeus]

I remember some disussion about this at the party. I think it's a great idea. I'm kinda blank for ideas at the moment, I'll express them when they come to me. If there's anything that I can do down the road, just let me know, I'll be glad to lend a hand.

[ghostofdavid]

YES!!!! Finally, more to waste time on the internets with. Scalli, you should be the patron saint of shisha.

[web250]

Great idea. Maybe just a simple MYSQL database with all of the major retails (SS, HS, HC, etc.) that could hold company, brand, flavor, price, and size (50/250).

Then you could display pages *so* easily by just using a simple php query like:
SELECT company,brand,flavor,price,size FROM database WHERE brand = "al waha" AND flavor = "orange" AND SIZE = 250

That could be used to print a table of all retailers that meet that price.

Very easy to do with simple PHP/MYSQL knowledge.

my site: [url="http://www.theartistdistrict.com"]http://www.theartistdistrict.com[/url] I've become a bit of a PHP wiz.

[Scalliwag]

I am not a programmer so I have to take your word for it bro. Evans wants to go with PHP as well. I just need it to be as stable as possible and be able to handle a lot of data.
how we pull product and price data is another scenario that I am not certain of how the best way is. Talking to software developers makes me dizzy after about five minutes I just can't keep up when they start talking about code.

[web250]

[quote name='Scalliwag']I am not a programmer so I have to take your word for it bro. Evans wants to go with PHP as well. I just need it to be as stable as possible and be able to handle a lot of data.  
how we pull product and price data is another scenario that I am not certain of how the best way is. Talking to software developers makes me dizzy after about five minutes I just can't keep up when they start talking about code.[/quote]

Well if you ever want any help, shoot me a PM

[Scalliwag]

We will need all help we can get. I am going to talk to Corey (Evanslight) and try to get a good planning method setup to where everybody involved can coordinate.

[gumonshoe]

My coding skills aren't very good... but if you want someone to help with data input, let me know.

[aronparsons]

I might be able to donate some time to this. I'm very proficient at PHP and have quite a bit of experience with SQL; I prefer to work on the backend versus the UI though.

[steve]

Hey Can I be in the shit load of molasses to sell section !!!!

[Scalliwag]

[quote name='steve']Hey Can I be in the shit load of molasses to sell section !!!![/quote]

sure bro!!! We will probably have a classifieds section that works a little like Craigslist for non-commercial personal ads. You would fall into that category and that way your shisha gets seen. That would be a buyer beware area.
If we wanted to complicate the hell out of things we could have item numbers to where people bought items through a checkout system to where they and the seller would get a verification that the buyer agrees to the terms of the sale. That way a feedback system could be put into place.

But that is another thing that could be a headache and would be on the backburner.

[Scalliwag]

[quote name='aronparsons']I might be able to donate some time to this.  I'm very proficient at PHP and have quite a bit of experience with SQL; I prefer to work on the backend versus the UI though.[/quote]

We may take you up on that as well. I am putting down names of those willing to take a shot at this. Anyone familiar with the way Pricewatch actually works would be helpful as well.
For vendors that need websites setup to work with the system it is something that some of you guys could make money doing that.
Especially anyone that could come up with a website template that could be modified quickly and easily that everything worked well with the system.

Some of the things I would like to see is a way to factor in shipping costs when someone does a search. Also if there was something you wanted but could not find as good a deal as you wanted, that you could set a price "to your door" and get an email notification if a vendor had a sale or a new vendor came aboard that met the criteria.

We could also do "wish lists" and for any of the vendors that wanted to take the time and put a price together for larger purchases they could. We could have all that data only viewable by vendors.
LOTS and LOTS of ways to set the system up.
At first I thought that ads would be the way to go when I first brought the idea up. now I am more inclined to having low priced annual vendor fees that were flat charges and would be the same for large or small vendors.

If it takes off I am pretty sure it is going to have to be on a good server system with a lot of bandwidth available.
That is all still in planning phase as well and until we get the ball rolling a little a bit we can get a feel on that. A guess at annual hosting cost for a very efficient system with failover and all needs to be considered.

[EvansLight]

Yea mysql and php are what were going to use on this. I cant code it... cause... yea i suck with php. I will gladly do the design work though.

As for planning, i say this calls for a meeting at scallys over a nice hookah

[Sonthert]

Scalli, with the great idea, again.

[Scalliwag]

[quote name='Sonthert']Scalli, with the great idea, again.[/quote]

I owe all the cool ideas to Shinerbock! Only dumb ideas seem to come to me unless I have a few of those

[web250]

Cool to see people are interested in this.

[cabanapatio]

what a great idea! i think setting up geographical areas for shisha would be pretty awesome! again, great idea!

[Scalliwag]

[quote name='cabanapatio']what a great idea! i think setting up geographical areas for shisha would be pretty awesome! again, great idea! [/quote]

Do you mean like a store locator for walk-in purchases?

[pboyle]

I'm not a coder of any sorts really but just for the sake of creativity, try implementing the googlemaps API into the loungewatch. You can have lounges pre-marked and easy to find. So if a user inputs his or her address they'll see little flags around their home that mark the local lounges.

Googlemaps also, in my opinion, gives better directions than mapquest and is better with scrolling because of AJAX.

Look into other API services that companies allow you to tie into. They can be really helpful and are incredibly user-friendly.
If you have the skills, a website like ning.com can give you good ideas. You'd just have to port them to your own sql server.

[Scalliwag]

[quote name='pboyle']I'm not a coder of any sorts really but just for the sake of creativity, try implementing the googlemaps API into the loungewatch. You can have lounges pre-marked and easy to find. So if a user inputs his or her address they'll see little flags around their home that mark the local lounges.

Googlemaps also, in my opinion, gives better directions than mapquest and is better with scrolling because of AJAX.

Look into other API services that companies allow you to tie into. They can be really helpful and are incredibly user-friendly.
If you have the skills, a website like ning.com can give you good ideas. You'd just have to port them to your own sql server.[/quote]

That is great info. I am reading on API feeds and the more I read the more I like it. But like you said you need the skills to use the info. The more I read the more questions I have.
Any of you guys knowledgible with API feeds?
For vendors with sites that we cannot mine their data they can use forms and manually list the products they want to list. Something like this [url="https://products.secureserver.net/products/quickshoppingcart/build.htm"]https://products.secureserver.net/products/...gcart/build.htm[/url] except instead of it listing items to Ebay it pumps the data into the Hookahwatch database and retrieves data just as though it was being pulled from vendors websites using their logos, etc.
By the time we get this going there will probably be people that could offer their services to vendors to make their website compliant.
I know that Evans works for hookah stuff so trading services could come into play as well

[jonny_lech]

I'm a software engineer. At work I do two things. One is going to meetings which usually include brainstorming. The other thing is writing web applications all day.

IMO, PHP is a bad choice. There are much better languages out there. Perl, Ruby (especially on Rails) or Java. Personally, I would avoid working with PHP .

[EvansLight]

PHP is the easiest to use and implement. What is it about php you dont like?