Wizards of the Coast has been doing it’s damndest to convince us that they can provide an excellent online experience. They are offering up a new online magazine, character generator, mapping program and online game area.
Yet time and time again WotC has proven to us that they have absolutely no idea what their doing with the web. They’ve failed us with their website and I’ll show you why.
I woke up to another Twitteriffic morning. It wasn’t a month ago that I thought Twitter was a useless waste of time. Now I find it to be just as important to my daily activities as IM, email and Clearspace. I’ve made some very interesting and valuable connections through it. It gives me a certain sense of connection to the community. I love how brain-dead simple it is. That little 140 character box has forced me to become much more succinct and focused. Alas, it’s another giant time-sink that I find can be distracting. Like anything else, sometimes you just need to turn it off.
The new Jive Software site is finally up and kicking. It was a fantastic effort from our entire team to get to birth this whale and I couldn’t be a prouder father. We completely pitched out our old site and started completely fresh. Chris Kalani and I started on the new designs about 4 or 5 months ago, with a lot of careful analysis and planning. We garnered feedback from the whole company as to what they liked and disliked about the old site and how we could improve. Then we set out to make the best site we could.
We had some very specific design goals and ideas in mind. These were all goals that we could not and would not compromise on. We could argue about colors, layout and content till our faces were blue, but if it didn’t meet these goals, it was out.
To start out we browsed the web to see who was doing it right. I believe strongly in the philosophy that, “Good designers borrow. Great designers steal.” You can see most of our influence in my Flickr set, Web Design Inspiration.
We actually printed all of them out and posted them up on our wall so that we could always see them and reference them quickly. Then we began the process of generating wireframes and mockups. I don’t believe there is ever a completely linear path for designing a website. We’d jump back and forth between sketching ideas on paper, scribbling something up on a marker board or editing something in photoshop. We were never really done with sketching or mocking something up. If something needed changing we would either discuss it and alter it or tear it apart and start from scratch. Fortunately we had the time to do so.
I long ago lost count of the number of mockups we did. Some of that could probably be attributed to the fact that Jive as a company was swiftly growing during this time period. It’s worth mentioning that we were also working on a new logo, a new community, a new version of Clearspace, aquiring Jotlet, creating a new booth and completely rethinking some of our strategies. We were challenged with the fact that at times we still didn’t know how we were positioning our product or building our messaging. We definitely ran into some chicken or the egg problems with the design and content. We designers wanted to know exactly what sort of content we should expect in order to best build a design around that specific message. Meanwhile everyone else wanted to know what things would look like and how they would lay out so they had an idea of what to write. That’s something I hope to fix with my process in the future.
Overall it worked out well. While we probably spun our wheels a few times, we definitely came up with some really solid designs. While I love what we finally decided on, I think there are a lot of really great designs in our mockup pool. You can check them out for yourself on Flickr.
In the end I think we came up with an incredibly stellar site. We have a modular, flexible site than is easy to navigate yet looks killer. We incorporated Clearspace seamlessly into our site, driving our blogs and news and running our communities. All in all I feel that our site accurately reflect who we are as a company and what we’re trying to accomplish.
I should of course shout out a huge thanks to all who worked on the site. Designers: Chris Kalani, David Carroll and Josh Pyles. Backend Codeninjas: Benjamin Sherman, Chris Bohnert and Tim Neuwerth. Project manager and wall of defense: David Greenberg. Our SEO and Lead Gen master, Paul Biggs. And last but not least, our steadfast leader who let us do our own thing and do it well, Sam Lawrence. We survived a new logo, a new product, explosive growth and being relegated to the Manstable to put out an incredible site.
Oh and lest I forget, a huge thanks to all our wives and lady friends for putting up with us throughout this process.
I must admit. When I first heard the name Startupalooza I dismissed it as a silly name that I wouldn’t be interested in. Then I started reading about who would be there and what they would be talking about. Josh Williams & Mark Frohnmayer of GarageGames. Kurt Deutscher to demo ExpressionEngine. Jason Glaspey & Matt King to demo Unthirsty. Heck, even my friends and co-founders of Jive, Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker would be talking. By the morning of Startupalooza I was driving my lady nuts with concerns about arriving on time. Despite the rain, sun and hail, we made it just fine, despite the general lack of parking in the area.
Todd and the Legion of Tech did an great job of putting the show together with the folks from Cubespace. to borrow Scott’s format, the highlights for me were:
It’s obvious I moved to the right town. The collaborative spirit here is awesome. There is so much to take part in and everyone is eager for feedback and participation. Though it was still mostly a sausage-fest, it was good to see a number of women in the audience. I was also pleasantly surprised by the range of ages represented.
The event was quite inspiring and I’m glad we attended. I came home on fire, ready to get back to some pet projects so I can share them with others. I’m also eager to spread my design knowledge to those in need. As Rick (or perhaps Kistner) said on the Technopreneur panel, “Don’t take your knowledge for granted. Someone out there is in need of it.”
Oh and Todd, I still think the names silly. Silly, memorable and tied to a great event.
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