Even if we do not communicate too much about SocialCompare, due to a lack of time, we work hard to launch the service as soon as possible.
Actually, we were a bit hesitating to launch the first version that you can see on the screencast in September, because we were not really satisfied about 3 main points that we try to improve before opening the website:
- Web Design
- Ergonomy & Technical architecture choices
- Content / Data
- Web Design
Concerning the first point, I consider that we are ready. Of course, as we do bootstrapping, it could not be as perfect, as if we used a real and professional web designer, but this new version looks globally better than the first one. We have mainly changed header, footer and even homepage or other pages appearance. The best thing would be to get a web designer for future versions obviously. - Ergonomy & Technical architecture choices
Second, when we started SocialCompare development, more than one year ago now, we tried to maintain 2 versions for editing comparisons, one with modern, dynamic ergonomy (using javascript technology) and another one using more static, old way to do things. But we changed our mind, we prefer to focus only on 1 version with javascript to have a nice ergonomy of the website and it will be really more easier for us to maintain on the long term basis…
We profit to redesign a lot of things on technical and database architectures… Therefore as we impact a lot of things in our current version, we decided to wait the end of this redesign to communicate and launch directlty the second version…
Maybe we will not finish to implement or migrate all the functionalities already available on the first version (such as the comparison basket)… when we will release directly “the second version”… but as soon as possible we will deliver every functionality that deserves to be added on the service, we hope that it will be a lot of improvements and innovations in perspective
- Content / Data
Finally concerning the last point that is not satisfying, we will not focus on that, at the beginning, because it is not our priority. We know that this point is really important to attract people to visit our website. We know that we need to add a lot of contents to have more valuable things to do on our service and incite users to spend time and enjoy our service. But we will do that in a second phase, later. Our first priority is to focus on the real new value that we add on the market, that differentiates us from so numerous comparisons websites on Internet :- freedom to create easily any comparison from scratch about everything, especially those that are not price comparisons,
- possibility to reuse existing contents to create easily new comparisons,
- users community to maintain collective and structured data,
- possibility to suggest comparisons updates to a private maintainer,
- …etc…
March 2nd, 2010 at %I:%M %p
[...] explained in my previous post, for the moment, we have few content, we need to create more. Indeed, we depend on users generated [...]