I’ve been working on this a few weeks ago and thought of instead of marketing it as an “online notebook”, I decided to focus on the community aspect of the site. In line with the popularity of social networking sites among college students, I was thinking it would make it more attractive to my target market. Other incentives that I came up with:
- customizable avatars — not too distracting, but rather something fun and visual to represent yourself
- ranks — your avatar can “level-up” depending on the rank you picked primarily. For example, you start with “Child Prodigy” and then with a set number of maybe word-count or notebooks/research notes/papers, then you level up to, say, “Mad Genius Scientist.” Or something like that.
- pets – it’s not going to be like a Flash game (i.e. Cafe World) that it will become distracting. It’s merely decorative, like the avatar, but it also levels-up/gets smarter based on…I have to figure that out first. It eventually “evolves” or changes in appearance depending on the smart-level. Like Pokemon! Haha.
- the way sections of the site are divided, it would seem more like a neighborhood/community than just a list of notebooks, subjects, and topics.
What do you think?
(And if anyone’s reading this, if you know any PHP/mySQL/XML web developers, maybe you can email me (@gmail: melonlime) contact info so I could ask if he/she is interested in coding the backend for my thesis? I’m sort-of desperate. I will pay except, I really am still a student and this is for thesis.)
support HTML5 fully. I want to say I don’t care about IE8 but I shouldn’t. 
