LardWars

From Herlo

LardWars is up! You can view it at http://www.lardwars.com.

So I have been toying with this concept of creating a website that will allow groups of people to compete with each other in a sort of Biggest Loser contest online. I’ve seen a few other implementations at http://www.weightlosswars.com and http://biggestloser.mynameistim.com. Now I will say that the one at mynameistim.com inspired me to create LardWars (along with Jordy) and I think its more of an implementation I am choosing to do.

I want to implement LardWars free of charge, maybe just have some Google AdSense on there to pay for hosting and other improvements I choose to make. Eventually, I see it providing a charge for things like extras above and beyond what the site was initially intended to do, although I can’t think of anything now, I am sure it will come along soon.

My plan is pretty simple, provide people with a good clean interface with simple instructions and let them setup a good competition. LardWars will have some cool graphic capability and on the front page, will show three or four different groups stats each time, maybe the best, maybe not. Other ideas would be to let people include a (relatively small) photo with their profile to show them how good they are doing after a while. Motivation, of course, for this site though is truly competitive and should drive everything, so there will be a prize involved and of course bragging rights on the site for anyone who wins/is winning their contest with a simple blog under the group page.

Lard Wars Design

Lard Wars is designed to be a flexible weight loss competition site. The ultimate goal is to allow individuals to compete with each other for prizes or bragging rites as to how much of their goal (either weight, bmi, fat, etc) they've lost. Lard Wars is intended to be for those of us pudgy enough to actually lose weight. Tracking of muscle mass, in or outside of competitions, and other items is currently not in the cards.

Phase 1

• Individual Weight Loss
  • Currently, only the group weight loss is tracked.
• Reminder Emails/Text Messages/Pages for exercise and/or eating.
• Exercises/Meals Tracking providing the ability to fill them out and track them online.
• What does this weight look like?
  • Show graphs of the totals per user.
  • Show graphs of the total lost per group.
• User/Participant Signup for new people who want to use this system to have a competition.
  • Simplistic
    • 2 clicks, 4 entry boxes, you're signed up.
  • Easy to register, same as login.
  • Verify email info, agree to terms, captcha.
• Three main pages
  • Main Profile
    • Weight entry
    • Last 30 entries (expandable to entire history)
    • Personal Graph
    • Journal Entries for each submission
    • Enter Weight, BF, Water content.
    • Calculate BMI each time / overall
  • Account Information
  • Groups
    • Allow participants to join a specific group to compete and meet their goals and such.

• Individual Weight/Fat Tracking within the user's own profile. Much like a profile on a cms, but with more exercise specific stuff.
• Rules Engine to define what the competitors will abide by.
• Define User Roles

Other Features

• Email daily results
• Palm Version