Feature Juggling

As we near the launch date of our raw foods recipes website, we’ve had to juggle a number of features and do our best to keep it simple. Because as we all know, the simplest thing possible is also the most likely to get launched on time!

Our main goal was to make the best website we could in a month – October. Thus, we are giving our first public showing at the PDX Web Innovators meeting this Wednesday, November 1st, and will be launching shortly thereafter. We have a heck of a long list of features we want to add, but for now we’re focusing on the key features:

  1. Browse raw food recipes.
  2. Discuss and rate the recipes.
  3. Add and track your own recipes.

Yeah, it’s simple. In fact, we’ve deliberately held back some features we’d even planned for launch, just so that we could be sure to get the recipes right from day one.

Being designers ourselves, it’s difficult to focus on the features and not the design. This can kill a project like this, because we have to write the code too! So for this project, we made ourselves a rule that we couldn’t work on the design until the last week in October. This has helped a lot (especially for me) because it forced us to spend most of our time thinking about the nuts and bolts, and by the time we got to working on the design, we already had most of our ideas worked out. It also kept the project on track.

Projects like this are a lot of fun for us. I think of it as a second job. Our “day job” is designing beautiful websites, often Flash-based, for creative clients. Very right brain stuff, and we’re fortunate to make a living at it. And after our client project work is done for the day, doing a bit of programming along with a design of our own adds a bit of left brain to the mix… and it’s almost relaxing!

Raymond Brigleb

Creative Director, dreamer, partner, father, musician, photographer. Has been known to ride the rails. Pulls one heck of a shot.