All that I can say is that we got off to a good start, getting our first web-site up within a week of getting rolling on Launch21. From there we quickly faltered on the “often” part of the phrase “ship early and often”. I thought its worthwhile to reflect on what happened.

The really positive take on things is that both Peyman and I have been incredibly busy working for clients and haven’t had much time to work on the site. I know it sounds like some form of posing, but if anything the demand for the stuff we do has exceeded my expectations. I’m incredibly grateful for the clients that we have signed up so far and want to focus on keeping them happy, which hasn’t left much time for fixing up this site.

That alone wouldn’t have kept us from some simple improvements, but we decided to make two major improvements both of which put us in that “there is no point doing the small stuff until these others are done” limbo. This is a common situation for software development projects to encounter- sometimes its unavoidable, but often you are better off making the effort to figure out how to break things down into smaller chunks.

The first major improvement is our new design. We have had some help designing a logo and a look for our site that better reflects the type of professional design and web-sites that we like to build. The site isn’t perfect today, but from my point of view its a 1000% improvement and enough in the right direction that it was time to get it online and iterate from here.

The second big change is that the site is now running on WordPress. For years I have done blogs using my own hand-rolled software because it forced me to stay familiar with all the technologies involved in delivering one of these sites at a low level. The down side is that when you do it yourself the publishing mechanisms are never as convenient as nice polished software like WordPress so posting becomes a big pain, leading to fewer posts and lots of missed opportunities at interesting things to say. I’m thick into RSS and all of those other technologies in a dozen ways now anyway, so I don’t need the blog to keep me real with that stuff and its nice to have the convenience. Speaking of which, my next project is to move AlexHopmann.com to WordPress too, which will likely be a bigger undertaking given my existing content there.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Launch21. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.