"Cut the adwords and the digg/share widgets. They're not going to get you money or traffic, respectively, and they look trashy."

With all due respect, are you serious? Most AdWords users I've heard from have had fairly positive feedback on the system.

And beyond that, it's likely that pedalpete has spent several months and/or thousands of dollars from his own pocket building a useful web aggregator that provides free, easy to use, searchable data to the teeming masses. And you're telling him to get rid of his site's single, small source of income, because you think it looks trashy? I'm all for minimalism in UI design, but get real.

I agree to an extent, but what Shawn might have meant is that the trade-off between cluttering the design and making a few cents/day right now isn't worth it.

It might be a better strategy to keep the most clean, minimalistic approach during the infant stages then introduce adwords once there's a steady stream of traffic.

Also, when you're moving the map center, scroll rather than reload: I forget the syntax, but you can see an example of what I mean by clicking here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q...

...and clicking the topmost photo on the map.

didn't know I could do that. Completely new to working with the maps.

I've made a few of the more minor changes you recommended (including the scrolling), and just uploaded it to the server, but I think the fonts/images, etc is going to take me some time. Probably won't get that sorted today.

But you've really opened my eyes, shawndrost, I can't thank you enough.

I'll be making lots of changes over the next few days I'm sure.

On the subject of scrolling, using the middle mouse button to scroll will scroll both the page and the map, which makes it a little annoying to use. The easiest way I can think of to fix this offhand would be to scale to the window size better (I am currently running 1024x768).

Also, I agree with the others who have suggested placing shows on the map immediately after a search.

That's AWESOME feedback sawndrost. I'm not being lazy, but just haven't been getting that kind of feedback - tech meetups are not de rigueur in my hometown of Whistler BC.

I'm not a huge fan of the look, and i've been tweaking and tweaking it. Even hired a designer, but we conflicted on a bunch of elements and this is what I ended up with.

It's a shame the player isn't working. I haven't heard that yet, and that is the best part - listen so you can discover the artists.

I specifically didn't want to populate the map with markers as it would just be full of markers, and you won't really decide to go to a show based on where it is, rather than who is playing, so I think the site would get just too busy with that.

But I'll definately be working on everything else you mentioned. Kinda makes me wish I could take down this post for now and repost later. ;)

Except for areas with a particularly high number of venues, (downtown, college campus, etc), the shows should turn up in groups based on where they're playing.

Actually, once you get going and have time to start adding features, I'd recommend trying to run some analysis on venues within the search range, and have places that typically fit the search pattern show up on the initial search. Searching for particular shows is certainly useful, but there would also be a lot of times when I'd like to just check out what type of music a place regularly plays. At any rate, it's just something to think about when you get a chance.

"my hometown of Whistler BC" -- ah, okay. You can try for the same effect via irc, try #startups on freenode.net. (http://www.mibbit.com lets you use irc via your browser.) You can also start a tech meetup, it's a lot easier than it looks, and you might be surprised at who shows up. Email local web developers, etc, sniff for interest. It might also be worth your time to take a trip to vancouver when there's something cool happening -- aside from the direct benefits of feedback, etc, it's really motivating.

"it would just be full of markers" -- you're right, you don't want a ton of markers, but if a search has more than (say) 10 results, you probably need to paginate anyway.

Second the markers sentiment... put 'em on there. I'd rather have say 100 markers crowding my map (and knowing that there are 100 events in my area) than not seeing any.