Website / App to explore sites & find centers to dive them

[Vdsh]

Hi everyone,


My wife and I love travelling abroad to experience new dives. When preparing for our trip, we usually check the nicest dive sites in the area and the ones we would like to do. There are tons of great websites for this.

However, we found that it is harder to get a sense of what dive centers were in the area and giving us the most chances to do those dives.


From this observation (and that was before we got kids, so much more free time on my hands!), I decided to build a website to try to tie together the dive sites & the dive centers.


I am now finally happy with the first version https://discovereef.com/ where you can easily (& hopefully in a nice way) search for scuba sites & dive centers. The next step would be to attract the centers so they can “update their profile” or give more details about what they do / where they usually go diving to help divers decide with whom to dive.


What do you think about the concept?


Any feedback or suggestion is welcome! Thanks in advance

 

[kelemvor]

Scuba Earth by DiveBuddy.com | DiveBuddy.com

This has been around for a long time. A decade or so.

Yours has a better look but since it's new it has far less data.


I tried to do something similar with boat launches a few years back. Mine never took off though and I got tired of clearing out all the spam.

 

[Vdsh]

Thanks for the feedback Kelemvor. Indeed, I am now focusing on improving the content but it's very time-consuming!!

 

[descend]

I love the map-based approach! The database you have for sites & centres seems to be pretty thorough, too.

Personally, I'm not sure I'd want to find both a dive site and shop in the same filter list on the left. I didn't even notice the shop filters until I had to scroll down. Maybe a tabbed area where you can toggle between sites & centres would be helpful instead of collapsible areas?

Minor gripes:
It seems it the data lists Curaçao as Curacao and also as a state instead of a country. I expect fixing tiny issues with the data is probably a full time job by itself, though!
Also, I'm sure you've already thought of this, but any website that shows a map can get political with where borders are drawn and what's labeled as a country. Looks like you're using Arcgis, though, so they might already be solving that for ya.

Edit: One last helpful extra feature - if the website asked for your GPS location and showed you local stuff, that would be easier than typing in the general region name. I tried specific addresses, and it seems like only general regions are accepted. That part is fair - I mean you're not trying to be Google Maps