Monday, May 18, 2009

Narrowboat Directory - Looking for ideas / feedback.

I am currently building a new website which I am hoping to launch in July 2009 which will be available on the following URL:

http://www.NarrowboatDirectory.com


As you can probably tell, the idea of the website is to be a directory of all Narrowboats in the UK. I have the current listings from BW, EA & the Broads Authority which are all pretty poor when it comes to database design. E.g. The BW database has approx 12,000 Narrowboats but it has approximately 3,500 different Manufacturer names!

So, a simple bit of maths tells you that there must be something wrong, it's unlikely that there were so many craft builders and even less likely that on average they only built 3 boats each.

A couple of weeks ago I dug deeper into the data and realised it was a real mess, but you'll be glad to know I am sorting it all out and creating a new database with a unique list of Craft builders, so when my new site goes live you will actually be able to see all the boats manufactured by the same craft builder!

Of course with 12k+ boats I may make the odd mistake, and of course my source data may well be wrong in the first place!

What I am hoping is that some of the people who read my blog and own Narrowboats might actually be interested in my new site? If you are, I would be really interested to get some feedback comments with your ideas of what sort of information I should store related to each of the boats?

My medium term goal is to allow boat owners to update their own records with things like links to their blogs / websites. Contact details (not public) to allow easy contact (i.e. a forwarding service for messages)

What else would you as Narrowboat owners like to see in a Narrowboat Directory?

If you have your own blogs, it would be great if you could link to this article to try and increase the amount of feedback it receives, thanks everyone in advance!

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