East Valley Drinkers: My Most Ambitious Web Project Yet

Most of the websites I build start with a fairly straightforward goal. A business needs a better website. A directory needs a better way to organize information. A community needs a place to communicate.

East Valley Drinkers started differently.

What began as an idea for bringing together people who enjoy local breweries, bars, restaurants, and social drinking around Arizona’s East Valley has evolved into my most ambitious web development project yet.

I’m not simply building another local directory.

I’m building a platform around the local drinking community.

Starting With a Simple Idea

The original idea behind East Valley Drinkers was simple: create a community where people around Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe, Queen Creek, and the surrounding East Valley could discover places to grab a drink and meet other people who enjoy doing the same.

The Facebook group provides the social side of that idea. People can talk, share recommendations, post photos, and eventually organize meetups.

But I wanted the website to do something Facebook couldn’t do very well.

I wanted to turn all of that local activity into useful, organized information.

That’s when the project became much bigger.

Building a Local Brewery Database

One of the foundations of East Valley Drinkers is a growing database of local breweries.

Instead of creating a basic page with a list of brewery names, I’m building structured brewery profiles that can power multiple parts of the website.

A brewery can have its own profile, location information, available beers, community activity, and rankings.

That same information can then be used throughout the website without having to manually recreate it.

The goal is to build the database once and let the platform do more with it.

Letting the Community Rate Individual Beers

This is where East Valley Drinkers really started becoming something different.

Visitors aren’t limited to rating a brewery as a whole.

They can vote for the individual beers they actually drink.

Open a brewery, tap Rate Our Beers, find the beer you’re drinking, and cast your vote.

The interface is designed primarily for a phone because that’s where people will actually use it — sitting at a brewery with a beer in front of them.

The system can organize beers by style, including IPA, lager, Kölsch, pilsner, hard seltzer, Märzen, and others. It can also show which beers someone has already voted for.

That creates information that becomes more valuable as participation grows.

Turning Votes Into Something Useful

Collecting votes is only the beginning.

The larger goal is to use those votes throughout East Valley Drinkers.

Community voting can help determine a brewery’s most popular beers. Those results can appear on brewery profiles, directories, rankings, and eventually dedicated leaderboards.

Instead of me declaring:

“These are the best beers in the East Valley.”

East Valley Drinkers can increasingly say:

“These are the beers the community is choosing.”

That’s a much more interesting model.

A beer receiving votes at a brewery isn’t an isolated interaction. That vote can contribute to other parts of the platform automatically.

Connecting the Website to the Real World

One of my favorite parts of the project is the Take Photo & Share feature.

After rating beers, someone can take a photo directly from their phone. The website can then help move that interaction into the East Valley Drinkers Facebook group.

That creates a bridge between the structured website and the social community.

The website handles things like breweries, beers, voting, rankings, and discovery.

Facebook handles conversation, photos, personalities, and interaction between members.

Rather than trying to replace Facebook, I’m designing the two to complement each other.

Mobile First Isn’t Optional

East Valley Drinkers has also forced me to think differently about interface design.

This isn’t a website I expect people to primarily use while sitting at a desktop computer.

They’re going to use it at breweries, restaurants, bars, patios, events, and meetups.

That means the phone experience has to come first.

Buttons need to be easy to tap. Beer lists need to be searchable. Information needs to appear quickly. Voting can’t require a complicated process.

It’s designing the experience around someone holding a beer in one hand and a phone in the other.

A Platform That Can Keep Growing

The reason I consider East Valley Drinkers my most ambitious project isn’t necessarily the size of the website today.

It’s the architecture I’m building underneath it.

The brewery database can power profiles and directories. Beer data can power brewery menus and search. Community votes can generate rankings and leaderboards. Mobile interactions can feed the social community.

And all of those pieces can continue becoming more useful as additional breweries, beers, cities, members, and votes are added.

There are plenty of directions the platform can eventually take: brewery discovery, beer rankings, city-specific pages, events, community favorites, drinking guides, brewery comparisons, and other features I haven’t built yet.

The important part is creating a foundation capable of supporting them.

More Than Another Portfolio Website

I’ve built plenty of websites over the years.

East Valley Drinkers feels different.

I’m working on the branding, user experience, database structure, custom functionality, mobile interface, community strategy, content, and the systems that connect everything together.

There isn’t a template that does exactly what I want East Valley Drinkers to do.

That means I’m figuring out many of the pieces as I build them.

And that’s exactly what makes the project exciting.

East Valley Drinkers isn’t just another website in my portfolio. It’s the most ambitious digital platform I’ve attempted to build so far — and I’m still building it.