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Blog about web design & development

I have great startup idea: It’s Hacker News ReDesign

Friday, September 24, 2010 { 0 Comments }

Hacker News is probably the best community for startups, computer businesses, new progressive technologies and movements, new programming languages and database concepts ..

The "problem" with HN is that is rapidly growing. Every day many new "hackers" are joining the site pushing more end more news and discussions.

But the growth without proper direction and vision can destroy one web site. Excellent example for this is Digg. They didn’t manage to control their growth and the users are leaving the site. Another but this time positive example is Reddit everyone thought they will fail but they canalize their enlargement and did proportional and healthy growth.

I think that the HN founder and maintainer of the site Paul Graham is deliberately trying to keep HN less attractive for the newcomers in order to maintain the quality not quantity. So the site has never been seriously redesigned.

But like I sad the community is growing, and the users need site that works.

This is my personal list of the things that need to be changed:

1) Better readability(typography) I wrote before about this.

2) Official Site Search

3) Official API

4) Possibility to bookmark an article (there are some HN discussion and advices that are priceless, I don’t want to use Delicios for that anymore)

5) Official Tell HN section (people desperately need some place where can show their products, new ides, new startups …)

6) 30 + 5 just submitted articles on the front page ( this can give more possibilities to the new articles to get more attention)

7) Your thoughts, what you want to the new HN?

How all this can be done?
There are probably many people including myself that are willing to help for 20.000$ (that are usually the money that HN gives for one startup).

How can this startup earn money?
By one Ad one month program. There are many sites like Daring Fireball that have only one Ad on the web site that doesn’t disturb anyone.

So you have 20000$ investment for the site redesign and if you charge 1666$ per mount for the Advertisement you will earn 20000 in one year.

I was playing with my new wireframing tool and I sketch the New HN