Mark Willis

SnogMarryAvoid.me (now Snog.com)

Date Jan - Apr 2011
Reach 0.9 million / month (est)

Snog.com is a narcissistic social tool that is predominantly aimed at social media users. A fun little site that is addictive. I was given an idea, and I turned it into a hit.

Development, Infastructure and Interface

I was asked to get an idea off the ground. After being provided a few PSD designs I developed a php framework and database architecture from scratch.

I ran the site on my own dedicated hardware, and personally maintained every aspect of the site - hosting, dns, database, front-end, back-end and feature design and development.

30,000 visitors on the first day

The site instantly went viral, attracting around 30,000 visitors on the first day.

The site attracted significant traffic for the first two months.

Improving the concept

I personally thought up and developed features, such as the Live Feed - which boosted the average time on site to over 15 mins and subsequently almost doubled visitor interest and traffic.

My live feed idea has also been deployed on ThreeWords.me (both Snog.com and Threewords.me are majority owned by the same investment company).

My Departure

I had to unfortunately leave the project in March 2011 due to other projects taking priority, however my framework continued to run the site until May 2011. My framework had collected over 15 million posts and 76,000 users. It was then retired (after a new development team and sys admins came in) for an open source php framework (Kohana).

I continued to be involved by white-hat hacking the site and providing security advice as the replacement framework had several significant security flaws and bugs.

Unfortunately after I left the project the site's traffic has continued to decrease due to, a now, very slow feature release. The team does however have plans to try and get the traffic to how it was in Jan/Feb.

By end of May 2011 I was completly detatched from Snog.com.

Spillit.me

Date Dec 2010 - Present
Reach 20k /day

Information coming soon

MLW Games

Date Nov 2009 - Present
Reach 0.8 million / year

MLWGames.com is my personal toy project. A network of video game guides, visited by thousands of people a day; MLWGames.com is where I test new development techniques and trial marketing ideas.

Network of game guides.

Started in 2009 with GOW2EXP - a mathmatical tool for Gears of War 2. The tool allows visitors to calculate their progress in the online game, and how much they need to play to get to a desired level.

Seeing the demand for a dedicated guide (instead of the mass produced guides covered in adversts) I decided to create additional specially crafted guides for more games.

Viral Spread

Without spending a penny on marketing, each guide has done remarkably well - spreading virally across forums and game related sites.

A quick google search for mlwgames or gow2exp show thousands of sites mention the guides from MLWGames.com.

Traffic

The highest traffic comes shortly after the guide is created. For example, on day 2 of Bioshock2 guide - over 7,000 visits, day 3 - 8,000 and so on. Traffic dips in a similar way to gamer's interest to the game, resulting in only hundreds per day for the duration of the guide.

When a game puts on an event to attract back players - traffic to the related site can increase 1000%!

Marketing Successes

I take different approaches to each guide. Some I personally advertise on forums and related sites - the forum users then continue to spread the links.

I have used Youtube to drive visitors. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood got just under 1,000 visitors a day from youtube, for example.

Community Support

The success of the site relies on the community appreciating how well the guides were crafted, and how helpful they are. In return the community don't get bombarded with adverts!

Schooling

Although put together quickly, I use the guides to develop new development or design interface ideas. My way of improving my skills with real results.

GOW2EXP

Date Mar 2009 - Present
Reach 0.2 million / year

GOW2EXP for Gears of War 2 (Xbox360). Although I started this tool on my laptop sitting in front of my TV, this site has since been visited hundreds of thousands of times and spread across the game's community like wildfire.

First in the world

As soon as the Title Update 3 patch came out for Gears, work went into working out the requirements for each level. It took me two days to perfect the current algorithm (26 March 2009), which I then built into a website tool.

You can read more about the creation of gow2exp on the about page.

Viral Spread

GOW2EXP spread across forums, sites, blogs, social media until it was a widly recognised site in the Gears community.

Possible influence over the game

After gamers started using GOW2EXP they realised they would probably never 'complete' the online side of things, many sparked arguments and complained to Epic Games (the developers of Gears of War 2). Epic Games eventually started increasing the points in-game and adjusting the difficulty of reaching the 'end'.

Once I had introduced horde (a game mode) calculations into my calculator, people started again complaining and discussing on the Epic forums about how long it would take. Just 1 or 2 days after this, the game developers doubled the Horde exp for good.

API

In July 2011, for a fun side project, I created an API to allow developers to use my calculator to power their own apps.

This of course is just API training for myself.

TechnoIsFree

Date Dec 2010 - Present
Reach N/A

From concept to final production. TechnoIsFree is a music community which I designed and developed from scratch. I was approached in late 2010 to deliver the project, however due to many changes to the project along the way, the first beta testing didn't begin until early July 2011.

Bringing a music genre back to life

TechnoIsFree is aimed at building a community and awareness of the Techno music genre.

User Experience

TechnoIsFree has had UX consultants providing input during the course of the design and development process to ensure a great product for the end user.

Marketing

Several social marketing techniques will be used to try and get the site used. More data on this coming soon.

Technical

Running off my brand spanking new PHP framework and my dedicated hardware in the US, TechnoIsFree has a stable back-end. The biggset task is getting the site to all the existing and potential new Techno fans!

HomeBods

Date Nov 2010 - Present
Reach N/A

Release of this project has been delayed.

Coming soon

Information coming soon

Chunky Trips

Date 2010
Reach No data
Status Dead

I was asked to provide technical management and development of ChunkyTrips.com - an online student trip booking tool.

Cheap trips for Students

The concept was good - provide great trips for poor students! Delivery of the product was on time, however after project handover (where I left them to it) the marketing and actual running of the project let the site down.

Wasted potential

There is a lot of money to be made exploiting students desire to spend their money.

Technical

The site runs on a simple PHP Framework, and is integrated with Google checkout for payments. Hosted off my dedicated hardware.

Allditions

Date 2008
Reach N/A
Status Dead

Online auditions.

Coming soon

Information coming soon

Interface Design

I was approached to design and develop the front-end of this auditions website. Another developer was working on the back-end.

JustDevelop.it takeover

Due to development troubles, JustDevelop.it bought in and took over the name.

The project was cancelled shortly after.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

The director of the site and company put a lot of time and money into the project, but found the back-end development management difficult.

Getting the right team together is what makes any product work.

RateAFace

Date 2004-2008
Reach 30,000 / month (est)

RateAFace was my first large(ish) scale project, which I co-founded in 2004 and managed until 2008.

Social rating tool aimed at teenagers

RateAFace allowed users to rate others based on their looks, in much the same way as the "Hot or Not" and "Rate My *" principle that a lot of sites adopted during the Web 1.0 era.

Social photo rating for 20,000

The member base grew rapidly at first, but quickly lost momentum. Struggling with legacy code and lack of experience and knowledge, it was difficult to improve.

The site was holding just under 20,000 accounts and was receiving 90,000 daily page views during peak activity. Roughly 500,000 private messages were sent between users.

SMS Integration

RateAFace was also my first time integrating a web service with an SMS service. We ran the ability to improve your web based account via premimum rate SMS messages.

Financials

The project had very little funding, and made very little. However the experience it gave far exceeded that any educational institute could offer.

Potential Return

I worked on rebuilding a new version in 2008, however it was never polished (and is not really up to modern standards).

If RateAFace will ever return properly is is unlikely due to how the internet is becoming more mature, but still possible due to the ability to easily exploit human sexual instinct.

Takeover refusal

When we decided to halt the project, an American takeover bid we received was tempting - but I personally made the decision to hold onto the domain, data and code.

I have never regreted this, nor any other part of the project.