Gradual Change

We launched the new Carrie & Danielle website last night, quietly and without a lot of fuss (but thanks for the coverage, Techvibes). I’ve been through many website launches in the past and inevitably there are things you didn’t think of until the very last minute, tiny but significant differences between the staging and production environments and hours of “shall-we-shan’t-we” push the big red button moments.

This time, though, I took care to stick to the mantra of keeping things simple. To start we have essentially one feature on the site: a Daily Q&A that poses a question to the audience and encourages their replies. It’s deceptively simple, actually, in the sense that the questions themselves encourage thoughtfulness and reflection, so the answers from our community shape a discussion that we think is quite different from typical pattern of blog posts and comments. But still it is one feature, and to be perfectly frank by no means rocket science to build.

But that’s the thing about rocket science, you only really need it to build rockets. It’s foolishness to over-spec. websites these days, since so many fabulous tools are available to reduce the cost and time it takes to launch your business and build your community. As I’ve said before, the great thing about Matt and the WordPress community is the extent to which they build things that make sense for their market, rather than some arcane supposition of what the market should want.

And I’m always a huge fan of everything Marc Andreessen has to say about the importance of the market in determining whether business of any kind succeed. You have to understand your audience, build something that addresses a real need, and in many respects the rest will take care of itself.

Now I’m not suggesting we’ve built close to everything we want to build for our audience. But we have built what we’ve created for them, which I think is the most important point.