My first attempt at a start-up. Feedback appreciated:)

[wrack]

All right then. This is my first attempt at a start-up. I have created a site called HaggleHive (http://www.hagglehive.com). For the moment I have only enabled Australia as a country.

The idea is, it is community driven and works by users sharing their haggle (bargain) when buying certain (high-value) thing (e.g. A good deal on a washing machine). There is an option to upload the receipt as a proof. So if anyone else is looking for the same item, they can search for it, grab the receipt as a proof that someone else got a really good deal for the same item and go to a store and get them to either match that price or beat it (if the store does that).

There is no membership required at all. Just click the big glowing "Share My Haggle" button at top. It takes around couple of minutes to do so.

The whole thing in written from scratch using ASP.NET 4.5, SQL Server 2012 (Express) hosted in USA. From my end (Melbourne, Australia) the performance is amazing from a round trip of the globe perspective. Please go to http://www.hagglehive.com/en-au/HaggleList and navigate around by clicking "Next" "Previous" and tell me how it feels at your end. I have created my own static content handler to deliver css, js and images with correct compression, last-modified and etag headers. Everything is done using the routing and all the url's are seo friendly (I hope).

I have still got to get the About Us & Contact Us page working. Rest is good.

What do you think?

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Just my two cents:

 

- Little dark these boxes

 

- Save this bookmarklet to generate Image Sprites on your site, it will save HTTP request and image size as well: (It works in Chrome as well now)

javascript:(function(){var spritemejs=document.createElement('SCRIPT');spritemejs.type='text/javascript';spritemejs.src='http://spriteme.org/spriteme.js';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(spritemejs);})();

Follow this written tutorial: http://yuvapix.com/Thread-Time-Saving-CSS-Sprite-Technique#.VF5T89wZW70

[wrack]

Just my two cents:

 

- Little dark these boxes

Thanks. I have made those boxes dark now. Looks better.

 

I was aware of sprites but didn't use them because, apart from the Logo, Share My Haggle and 3 Search Buttons, the rest of the images are localized for the country selected by the user. I will eventually find a better of doing this but for the time being I am going to keep those images as they are.

 

But I will keep this in mind, thanks.

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Thanks. I have made those boxes dark now. Looks better.

 

I was aware of sprites but didn't use them because, apart from the Logo, Share My Haggle and 3 Search Buttons, the rest of the images are localized for the country selected by the user. I will eventually find a better of doing this but for the time being I am going to keep those images as they are.

 

But I will keep this in mind, thanks.

 

Fair enough.

 

Can you change dark brown top bar to more decent color, it makes text readability quite bad. For example, try this: #ECA687

 

 

What about this as well, removed break as well.

[wrack]

Fair enough.

Nah. I have just gone ahead and done the sprites.

 

Can you change dark brown top bar to more decent color, it makes text readability quite bad. For example, try this: #ECA687

Done. A little different colour though.

 

What about this as well, removed break as well.

Done too :)

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Nah. I have just gone ahead and done the sprites.

 

Done. A little different colour though.

 

Done too :)

 

Looking nice.

 

Also before officially launching, please look into Facebook error related to SHA-1 certificates shown in Firefox dev tools.

 

Also you can further compress sprite image through https://tinypng.com/ without losing transparency. It shaved 16 KB more. Ridiculous fast site, load times as per pingdom from texas are just 436 ms. Impressed!

[wrack]

Hmm, not sure why Facebook certificate errors are showing up! Will have to check them out.

Thanks on the speed remarks. I spent a lot of time to speed up things, going as far as writing my own static content handler to serve css, js, images and basic file types.

For me this project was as much as putting an idea together as well as a massive learning exercise.

[wrack]

Also before officially launching, please look into Facebook error related to SHA-1 certificates shown in Firefox dev tools.

My Firefox does not show any certificate errors. Just says my Facebook app id is not valid which I think is ok since I haven't put an app id in the scripts yet. May be something is blocked at your end?

[+Zlip792 MVC]

My Firefox does not show any certificate errors. Just says my Facebook app id is not valid which I think is ok since I haven't put an app id in the scripts yet. May be something is blocked at your end?

 

I think I get SHA1 certificates warning since I am using Firefox Nightly, which started to show SHA1 deprecation warning message like Chrome.

[wrack]

Also you can further compress sprite image through https://tinypng.com/ without losing transparency. It shaved 16 KB more.

Thanks for that link. I didn't know that one. I normally use OptiPNG to reduce their size but this one changes the it in a way that some color is selectively "lost/removed" making the size smaller but rarely visible to the naked eye.

I think I get SHA1 certificates warning since I am using Firefox Nightly, which started to show SHA1 deprecation warning message like Chrome.

Oh ok. I will put a nightly build on one of my VM to test it out but it may take a while. I am hoping they are not serious issues.

[wrack]

Ridiculous fast site, load times as per pingdom from texas are just 436 ms. Impressed!

Hey, how did you measure this? I checked pingdom but it seems to be a paid service. You must have an account with them. I tried other online tester and they are in the range of ~500ms around USA and for ~950ms for Australia. Guess that big ocean does take some time to cross!

[ZakO]

Hey, how did you measure this? I checked pingdom but it seems to be a paid service. You must have an account with them. I tried other online tester and they are in the range of ~500ms around USA and for ~950ms for Australia. Guess that big ocean does take some time to cross!

 

Pingdom has a free website speed test tool that lets you test from Texas, New York & Netherlands: http://tools.pingdom.com/

 

From the Texas server the content from your site takes ~250ms and then an extra ~300ms for the Google Analytics / Facebook stuff.

[wrack]

Pingdom has a free website speed test tool that lets you test from Texas, New York & Netherlands: http://tools.pingdom.com/

 

From the Texas server the content from your site takes ~250ms and then an extra ~300ms for the Google Analytics / Facebook stuff.

Thanks. That is a handy tool. Analytics is something I can't do much about, however I am planning to delay load the Facebook and Google Ads.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

It's a cool idea for a start up but how will you monetise it?

[wrack]

It's a cool idea for a start up but how will you monetise it?

Thanks. For the moment I am planning to get the revenue from Ads. If the site takes off then I will plan to meet some investors and see how that goes. First thing is to get people to start using it. I am also going to advertise it onto Facebook.

 

Any suggestions, ideas? Either from experience or knowledge?

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Thanks. For the moment I am planning to get the revenue from Ads. If the site takes off then I will plan to meet some investors and see how that goes. First thing is to get people to start using it. I am also going to advertise it onto Facebook.

 

Any suggestions, ideas? Either from experience or knowledge?

 

I used the very same site which ZakO told.

For delay loading them, one by one add async *attribute* in the script link and see it should not create worse experience so that's why suggesting one by one:

<script src="" async> or <script async src="">

async is much better than defer method. There is one catch though "unordered execution", that's why I said try one by one and delay only render blocking script not all.

 

- http://css-tricks.com/async-attribute-scripts-bottom/

- https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/20/script-injected-async-scripts-considered-harmful/#comment-1398899164

- Try with Twitter and Email marketing as well.

[wrack]

Thanks. I have already got async on some of them.

Will work on Twitter & Emailing.