Hi folks,
I wanted to introduce one of my side-side-projects: WordBueno. WordBueno.com is an online dictionary, similar to dictionary.com or lexico.com. It aims to be minimalist (in terms of design, not content), multilingual, mobile-friendly and fast.
I would be curious to hear your feedback and ideas.
Goal: Grow the traffic to 1M page views per month in 2022.
Challenges:
- SEO. WordBueno is client-side rendered SPA. This brings many challenges w.r.t. To SEO. I wrote about them and about solutions on my blog. (But I guess this topic is not new to this community).
- Data quality. Data is based on the great Wiktionary. Sadly Wiktionary is unstructured and so taking full advantage of the treasure trove of data is not easy.
- Data size. Currently the offline processing requires ~17GB RAM which is just over what my personal laptop can handle. Sadly the processors and other parts I would like to buy for a desktop are currently sold out. This definitely hampers my productivity as I need to run this on cloud.
Improvement ideas:
- Improve data quality. Especially in non-English languages the data can be quite sparse. I am thinking of leveraging international Wiktionaries, WordNet and machine translation.
- Add examples to the word senses.
- Add interlinking to non-English languages.
Growth ideas:
- Be active on twitter. Post “word of the day” and “word quiz” kind of tweets. Encourage people to retweet by offering prizes (is this allowed?).
- Build more “fresh” content on the website, like “word of the day” (any other ideas?), to keep people coming back.
- Build more games to make people stick around longer.
- Build browser extension that makes the dictionary, word of day and the games readily available.
My current traffic is still very low and looks like this: 1, 2.
Love it, especially as a developer of my own bilingual Hausa-English dictionary powered by MediaWiki and leveraging Wiktionary myself. Looking forward to using WordBueno and learning from what I can from it. Already love the random word quiz!