I began preliminary work for Basenotes March Madness 2011 today, a paper sketch that I always seem to need to do before designing a website or a database. I’ll be designing both in this case, but the core of the game will of course be on Basenotes. The site I’m building will host the nomination and voting process to select what fragrances make the cut, and will also manage the bracket challenge, where users attempt to predict the outcome of each game. At the end of a day’s games, I simply give the website the final results for the day and it records it, and gives me the code for the next day’s events.
What’s the website look like now? This. But believe it or not, the hard work is nearly over, the actual construction of the website is a pretty simple process having done work with databases for so long.
I’m still spotty on a lot of details, but I can tell you several major changes from prior years events:
– There will be two concurrent tournaments, men’s and women’s. I didn’t run a women’s tournament the first year because I was uncertain as to the popularity of the event, and the second year because I didn’t feel I’d have time to do both because of the amount of manual work involved. The tournaments won’t be segregated by gender, men can vote on the women’s contests and vice versa. The only difference is the brackets themselves will be quite different.
– Instead of the prediction contest’s old scoring system, where each game in round 1 was worth 1 point, then doubling in value for each round, users will be able to bet varying amounts for each game. Essentially each round’s old point values will be multiplied by 10. … (More) “BMM11 Behind The Scenes: Best Laid Plans”