So the GWT/GAE app I’ve been working on is ready for some testing and content! I realize now that the biggest hurdles in making a user content site is, well, getting the user content. Geez I never upload reviews to Yelp or reviews to Amazon…but some people do, right??
So what is it I’ve been working on? It’s a user-content based wedding dress photo site, featuring photos of real brides in their wedding dresses. There are 3243242 things wrong with the wedding dress industry. For those not familiar, here are some examples I’ve encountered/read about:
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- Retail: Brick-and-mortar stores are often restrictive, and don’t let you take photos of dresses you try on until you put down a deposit. Even worse, some cut off tags so you don’t know the designer, so when you find “your dress,” you have to buy it from them unless you can figure out a way to identify it.
- Sizing: Wedding dress sizing is um…messed up. You hear a lot about people who are “street size” 4 and “wedding dress size” 12. WTH! To make it worse, stores usually only carry one or two sample sizes. If you are not one of those sizes, you have to put up with trying on a dress 8 sizes too large for you with clips in the back, or even worse, if you are too large for the sample sizes, they “hold it up to you so you can get a feel for it.”
- Pricing: Oh yeah did I mention these things are ass-expensive? And you can’t even try it on in your size before you place an order on a NON-REFUNDABLE item? Seriously. The same exact dress in “bridesmaid” colors can be half the price or less.
- Models: I think the wedding industry really thinks brides-to-be are all tall stick-thin women with scowly faces. That seems to be their strategy for photo shoots anyways. Weddingbee.com even has a long thread about how weird dress models look. Here’s a real winner (sadly this is pretty typical of the photos on designer websites):
</rant>
Now that I’m done ranting, on to the webapp… here’s the main idea:
- Dress/Photo Finder: Brides-to-be can browse dresses by different styles and price criteria, and can see these photos of real brides in all shapes and sizes either trying on dresses or on their wedding days.
- User Content: Users can upload photos of themselves in their wedding dresses, or dresses they tried on, along with sizing information and additional comments about the dress.
- Community: Users can leave comments for a specific photo of a dress, and ask the user who uploaded questions about the dress. This would also be a good place to try to sell secondhand dresses post-wedding (I will be adding a “for sale” checkbox shortly).
I’ve uploaded the app to appengine, and it’s currently at http://omgdress.appspot.com, so take a look!
Here’s a peek at what it looks like so far:
I need your help!
I need help with testing and user content! I’ve only added a few dresses manually so far. The idea is that the site will eventually have a lot of popular dresses, but if your dress isn’t on it yet, you can request it through the “Account” tab, and I’ll approve each request (have to monitor content quality somehow…).
This is an alpha version that I wanted to get out there and try to get some content and feedback. Unfortunately, I don’t know that many brides or brides-to-be. If you are one, or know some, I would love to get your photos on the site and get some feedback! Either go to the site directly, or email me at jean@omgdresses.com. Any feedback would be much appreciated!