BrainFuel

Have you ever been forced to delay a personal project?

Maybe work interferes, or some other event in your life.

Maybe your personal project is to start up a new business, or as it was in my case, develop a set of web applications.

Side projects get delayed a lot, I have found. Usually because at the end of the day they don’t have an immediate payoff.

Or maybe you force yourself to deal with client projects first, and put your own projects aside for spare time.

I’ve been doing this for far too long. So long, that now, a couple of my personal projects have been pushed back 4, 5, even 6 years. I often come up with ideas and never actually invest the time they would require due to work commitments.

A few months ago I hit a critical point where all that I could think about was missed opportunities. Usually it happened this way: I’m browsing the internet, reading blogs, and then stumble across a brand new web application that does exactly what I wanted to do. And they’re making bank.

It was so bad, that for a while, all that I could think about was how, by accepting any new projects for other clients, I would just push back my own project yet again.

Two quick thoughts:

1. Ideas are not worth very much. It’s the execution of those ideas that is important.
2. Does accepting a $1,000 project (or whatever amount) actually cause me to defer potential thousands of dollars in residual income if I would just make my ideas into reality?

In conclusion, I ended up making the decision to spend time on my projects. Every weekend for the last few months I’ve been working on our web application. It’s been amazing. I have renewed enthusiasm for the other projects I work on, and I have my own “dream” becoming reality.

I encourage you to do the same. Stop delaying, and just start.

Here’s the site map for our web application (er, at least a screenshot zoomed so far out all you can see is the pages). We have a front end web site where we promote the site (top half), and administrative area (lower left), and of course the web app itself (lower right side).

Over the weekend I worked on our web application and made some significant progress. I’ve been open to feature changes if they make a significant improvement to our web application. Over the course of the last few months we’ve run across several.

Our process has been to design a quick mockup in Photoshop so that we can get a quick idea as to how the screen would look. Once we have those, we pass it around the team here and gather feedback.

This weekend I designed the settings page for our web application. On this page you can enter and change your username and password, view billing receipts, change your credit card, export your data (in CSV format), and also upload a user picture.

For the user picture, we’ve decided to go with the typical square image, since that’s what everybody is familiar with. We’re thinking about trying something unique, and that is to also allow you to upload an image of your logo. It’s unique because only you will be able to see it. More on that later.

As you can see, we allow people to upload two images. The image of the cowboy just might be our default user profile picture. We’re still trying to decide.

That’s an example of how it will look once you integrate both images into the header. It’s a nice and clean look, and is one of the ways people can personalize their experience.

Our web application is what people will describe as Web 2.0.

As such, I’m trying to determine whether we should create our products logo to fit that mold, or if we should find some careful balance between traditional and Web 2.0.

And don’t worry, it doesn’t have any reflections (*yet*).

I spent some time at LogoPond today. Check out this neat logo for The Limelight Group. And this one for Bulb.

Should a web application be designed first, or developed first?

It’s obvious that designers and programmers feel differently about this.

Take this perspective, for example (all quotes from comments here):

As a programmer, I produce ugly-but-functional designs for the HTML monkeys to tart up however they like. Trying to do it the other way around is a recipe for disaster.

And this one:

I would say both things have to be done in parallel rather than first coding and then designing or the reverse way. The final product has to be clear enough so that the designer can work on how to present it while the coder is implementing each functionality.

What do you think? Can it be both ways? With our web application that we are building, our process has been to design everything in Photoshop before writing a single line of code. This may sound backwards to some people, but it has allowed us to see what the user will see, and show people our application.

Our web app would not have been as cool as it is if we hadn’t started with design.

There have been a large number of design improvements, and functionality improvements that have been made as a result of seeing something designed.

It’s quite possible that many people think of the design as purely aesthetic, when I see both the beauty side, as well as functionality and ease of use.

What do you think? In your projects, do you begin with code or with design?

Continue Reading:

• 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website

For our web application one of the things we want to do is provide international support. Languages and support for overseas. We would probably focus on South America or European countries first, and then expand from there. It would be something we do after gaining some momentum.

I wrote about this after I returned from Brasil, and observed the huge market down there. I couldn’t figure out why more companies don’t do this.

I hope everybody had a great labor day weekend! Here at Tornado, it was all labor and very little play. If you call building your own web app labor. This weekend we made progress on several fronts.

• Firstly, we have the beginnings of a marketing site. It’s only a design concept at this point, however it’s something and it looks great. Realizing that we really need a copywriter at some point.
• I installed WordPress for our product blog. We’re going to be running our blog on a completely separate domain name for search engine reasons. We are going to begin posting to that blog now, but not tell anybody about it until the beta begins. We were able to pick up a cool domain name that has some good keywords in it.
• Spent some time working on the logo type treatment.
• More time was spent tweaking the actual application design. There are several key sections we still need to work on.
• We decided to simplify our sign up process and have just a few key things (username, password, name, email) required in order to get an account. Then in the settings section, you’ll be able to further customize the application. We have this currently drawn out on our whiteboard and we need to move it into the product design.
• We need to begin formulating the marketing plan on paper — right now, it’s all in our heads. We’re going to be approaching marketing in a grassroots sort of way, at least, that’s the initial plan.

Have you noticed that fewer and fewer web applications have demo accounts set up? Instead they have a nice short tour, and a drop-dead simple sign up process.

We were pondering whether we should have a demo or not for our upcoming web application. If we were to provide a demo account, people could click once and immediately be taken to a demo they can interact with. On the flip side, this would potentially lower the number of people that actually sign up for our product.

The free sign up idea works great, especially if you have a free version of your product.

I wonder how many thousands of people have signed up for Basecamp accounts, only to abandon them moments after logging in. It’s great for boosting your customer count.

Being able to say you have 500,000 customers is impressive (source: Basecamp homepage). I just wonder how many of those customers actually pay.