Need feedback and advice on next steps for a side project
I recently worked on a side project on schooling listing in Canada: https://www.pioneeredu.ca/
It lists public and private schools in Canada by location and school boards. This is my first project using the ReactJS framework together with GraphQL. I managed to gather the data for public schools in Ontario and British Columbia, and rendered each of them as a webpage.
The amount of time needed for this side project is much more than my estimation before getting started. I was hoping to spend a few weeks with it as a nice learning opportunity for React and GraphQL. But as of Dec 2019, it took me almost 4 months!
Now that the first phase of setting up the website is done, I am thinking of possible next steps to continue this project. I feel like the content on this website is very "dry" as there are only basic information, such as contacts, address, maps, etc., for the schools. I am curious to know what kind of value propositions are possible to make out of it?
Would love to hear some feedbacks from this awesome community, on topics such as improvements and possible next steps.
Expand on the basics with accurate and useful data collated from other sources (or yourself) which nowhere else has all in 1 place. Enable easy comparing between schools not just standalone pages.
eg.
Historical grades and rankings
Past reviews from parents
Famous alumni
Sports teams and results
Courses offered
I would add search first and foremost. Seems like its a useful resource for finding specifics about schools, URLs, phone num and addresses. Would be great to search by school name and find that info quicker. Congrats on the launch, estimations are always too low. :)
Thanks for the feedback! There is a search button for basic term based search right now, but you are right search is the most important, I should improve it to be more user friendly!
what were your main goal when you start developing this project ?
My goal was to provide a "yellow-page" like listing for Canadian schools. I was hoping if it would get some traffic then maybe it can attract some ads from local private schools.
However after I pulled it up, now the website feels very "dry", and does not look interesting.
yeah I think everyone's first idea when looking for something is to google it, if you can provide more information about schools more than google by contacting them but I think most of schools will have their own website.
I'm not sure of how you can proceed with the project but don't ever feel bad about it because you've learned so much along the path while building the product.
best of luck