[zakn]

I appreciate the feedback, especially as a fellow hiker.

A number of people now have mentioned that the first page is not working, so that's something I'm going to reevaluate. I need more info there beyond a daunting search box. At the moment, you can type in the name of a hike and it will show up, e.g. try "The Narrows". The site assumes hikes are named. If you're searching for a location, then you need to go to the maps. I should probably support searching for a location via the search box, e.g. if you search for colorado it will show you all the hikes in colorado, or zoom you into colorado on the map.

Maps. Currently the way to get to the maps is from the lat / lng link in the info box on the side. This will take you to a full screen map with a dot for that location. From here, I'd like to add support for GPX routes, but that is not implemented. It's interesting that you're keen on having maps as the focus because I find that maps aren't that useful for me when researching a hike, I just want the highlights - distance, elevation gain, elevation max, and then I want to see pictures of what the hike has to offer.

Thanks for the encouragement, I'm taking a lot from these comments and will have plenty to work on.

[_mulder_]

Perhaps take a look at AirBnB and the way they categorise some of their 'highlight' hosts. Perhaps you could suggest similar categories, "Scottish Hikes", "Mountains", "Ice Hikes", "River Hikes", "Best of Asia", etc. I appreciate you need some more hikes adding to the pool before you can do this (I'll add one later tonight).

Another idea regarding the usefulness of the landing page. Whilst I like to browse the hikes from other countries as some of them look very spectacular, it's not particularly useful to me. Perhaps with a bit of work you could do a 'get location by IP Address' or something similar and thereby suggest hikes local to me, or at least in the same country/continent.

[zakn]

My idea for the future Discover page was that you'd be able to filter the results by location, distance, elevation etc. I'm already using Google's jsapi to zoom the map into your location, but I've seen mixed results with it.

AirBnB is a great example of categories done right. I'll look into that.

[INTPenis]

Yeah don't give up on this, I've wanted a site like yours for years now.

But like the first poster said, there are some usability issues to fix.

Not sure if this was mentioned but for me the landing page works but I immediately click on Map because I don't know what to search for. Do place names show hikes in a specific radius? If so, what's the radius?

So map was much more straight forward to me, but when I then click on a red dot on the map I can't return to where I was on the map and the only way is to click Map again and return to the north american continent view.

[zakn]

I'm not sure I understand the question: "Do place names show hikes in a specific radius?" Are you talking about the orange dots on the map? They correspond to a single hike.

That is annoying that the map doesn't remember where you were. Seems like the best way to handle that is to store your last location in localstore.

[atjoslin]

He means if I type 'Seattle, WA' then what is the 'search radius' around Seattle that I will get for hikes?

[zakn]

Ah got it. At the moment, it would tell you that there are no hikes named "Seattle", since search only works on the name of the hike.

When I add support for searching by location (because this seems to be a popular request), then I think it should zoom you into the location, enough so that you could see all of Seattle. I think this can be done with google's jsapi / google maps but I'm going to have to investigate.

[coldpie]

If the purpose of the site is to find new hikes, presumably we don't already know the name of the hike we want :)

What I expected was a location-based thing: show me hikes near where I live. I would find that tremendously useful.

Good start!