Data Collection (Fall)

Part of the research stage of this project includes collecting the data we need for our website. There are 58 food trucks registered in the city of Boston, and we needed to gather each truck's name, food type, and links to their websites and social media accounts. Since the existing content of Boston food trucks will be driving the content on our site, we noted some key findings including the lack of or lack of up-to-date websites each food truck had. Most importantly, it appeared the quality and frequency of Twitter updates was the highest for all trucks who's accounts seem to be the most used way for customers to find out about a truck's current location, menu, or other information at this time. By keeping all of our data in one organized table, it will be more efficient for implementation next semester.

Next semester, we plan to find any existing introductory paragraphs, menus and popular dishes for each truck that we can include on each truck's page.

We also collected the trucks' logos from their websites or Facebook pages and placed them in a folder on Google Drive. We plan to feature these logos on individual food truck pages. From our research, we found that 10 of the 58 food trucks in Boston didn't have a logo readily available online. Somewhat surprisingly, the logos of the trucks we're typically very low quality non-vector .jpgs we usually pulled from the truck's twitter account profile or website. It's also important to keep in mind the huge variation in visual consistencies of logo styles will affect our truck page design since the logo quality is something we cannot control. This finding will lead to a discussion next semester regarding the prominency of the logo on each food truck page and how we will create our own placeholder logo or leave the space blank for the remaining 10 trucks.