This is a really interesting/fascinating webapp. A few suggestions.
1. Improve the design / User Interface. It's a bit clunky and diminishes the experience.
2. Make the search field auto-complete. Use jQuery and you could have it done in a few minutes. I am not a chemist, so I don't know the exact spelling of most chemicals or elements. <a href="http://jetlogs.org/2007/10/22/jquery-auto-suggest-with-keyup-event/" rel="nofollow">http://jetlogs.org/2007/10/22/jquery-auto-suggest-with-keyup...</a>
I really like the idea of being able to search for a molecule just by drawing it! It's a fantastic and intuitive idea, if it works...<p>Which it doesn't, at least for me. When I click the draw link, all I see is an empty white popup box with Preview and Submit buttons that I can't interact with.<p>Here's my setup, for debug purposes:<p>Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
I'm not sure if other tools like this exist but man I could've used something like this back in my Organic Chem classes. I like it, I tried to search for a few things and was able to find most of it (couldn't find nitroglycerin). Best of luck!
A fascinating WebApp, and really useful to schools and students, I would have thought. I've only tested it for about 2 minutes, but I already found one odd ommission - try searching for Ethene and see what you get.<p>Also it says that yo can search by common name, which is fabulous, but you might want to open the system up to crowd-sourcing so that people can contribute common names and attch them to molecules.<p>A search on Deoxyribonucleic acid, for example produces no hits.
I have to admit, as a hardcore hacker I'm clueless here. I wanted to type "water", "beer" then out of frustration I end up typing "wtf" lol.<p>Seriously you should find away to attract the attention of regular guys like me, the potential here is to make sense of chemistry to people by being a bit more talkative on the front page.<p>Overall it looks like a great tool.
Hire a designer and a copywriter because the way it is now tells me absolutely nothing. My first impression was that you could purchase these chemicals from the interface.<p>Play up the social aspects of it, too. As of now, I don't see what differentiates your site from PubChem (besides speed).<p>Hooking into a spectroscopy database would not be half bad either.
Try to remove your testing pages/comments:
<a href="http://www.chemsink.com/reaction_type/19/" rel="nofollow">http://www.chemsink.com/reaction_type/19/</a><p>Not sure how close you are to having real visitors, but test comments are never welcoming!
Very cool idea. I would suggest linking to chemical suppliers. I don't know if Sigma-Aldrich and the like have online stores, but that would be a very easy way to monetize this idea.