Come for the Ride…

In my day job, we’ve been working on redecorating our office space for the last few months. It started with new *matching* desks replacing the old ones. I swear, I don’t know the original reasoning behind it but everyone literally had a different modeled desk. It was so bad that I thought our office manager had a secret blog that reviewed different models of office desks.

However, now that all desk problems are solved, we’re running into issues on how to divide up the space. Again, we now have various models of dividers and partitions none of which are standard cubicle stuff.

Anyway, I found this Office Snapshots link today which I thought was cool. Maybe one day when our startup upgrades to an office, we’ll have something to look forward to. In the meantime, maybe we can get some ideas to save my day job space.

I miss the freedom of self employment. Where else can you hold two separate iChat work meetings (development and marketing), blast iTunes, watch TV, surf Facebook and be logged into 3 computers all at the same time?

Did I mention I wasn’t wearing pants? Alright, I was wearing pants… but still

I certainly don’t have that kind of freedom during the day.

On a separate and completely unrelated note, can someone help me figure this out?

iPod earphones work on the Macbook
iPhone earphones work on the Macbook
iPod earphones does not work on the iPhone…

what gives?

A couple of months ago, I talked about the importance of designing a website in wire frames. Now that we finally secured the design and the xhtml code, I can finally go into some details into the thought process behind the whole thing. By-the-Wei, if you haven’t checked out our old post, you should check it out and the link that’s associated with it. It will give you a much better idea of the information below.

Because our site isn’t officially launched yet, I will only cover part one of the design process for now. We feel comfortable disclosing this part because it actually looks like nothing like the final product, but maybe this will give you some ideas for your site while we wrap up our stuff.

Before we officially began the project, I did a quick research to see what web 2.0 design was about. Whether you think “web 2.0″ is a fad term or not, there is definitely something about the look of the new breed of websites that gave you a cleaner, more Zen like feel. Web 2.0 design is about balancing text with white space; it’s not about cramming as much text and information as you can above the fold to get the most out of your real estate. If you get a chance to check out many of today’s new start-ups, you’d get that feeling.

Some of the examples I’ve found… Oodle.com vs. Craigslist.org, Apple.com vs. MSN.com. When you go there, you see a distinct clear vs. busy.

Some other things I’ve noticed while doing research… web 2.0 sites are mostly about 960 pixels wide and most of them have a bold statement, text explaining the site. While our site will still be catering to people with 800×600 resolutions, future web logs will tell me if width expansion will be necessary.

The first mock-up our designer came back with was the above image. Like most of you are probably thinking, I too was wondering why certain elements are positioned the way they are. There just appeared to be so much wasted space around the logo; even if the goal was branding. Also, the bold line of text was new for me… new being uneasy.

I went back to the designer and insisted that we needed to do something about the prime real estate that was wasted up top. Even though I’m all for embracing web 2.0, some things as a biz dev guy, I just can’t let go of. Unfortunately, real estate is one of them.

The second comp the designer came back with was the above. This one was heavily influenced by me jamming my ideas and requirements into the mix. Since I didn’t understand the research section, we condensed the top to focus on just buyers and sellers. After all, we’re thinking that someone who comes to our site has a need… and we’re here to fill that need for speed (to buy and sell).

However, the second comp above presented a problem. Even though it crams more data together, we have two ad units placed right next to each other. Although this may be okay for some of our competitors… we felt that it would be unfair to our potential advertisers to be grouped that close to a potential competitor. So with that, we made a minor tweak to separate the two a tad bit.

This iteration of the design came out pretty well and it was something we stuck with for some time as we moved towards designing the internal pages. The next time we cover this topic, I will finish up with what we did for the home page and internal pages.

Amazon announced their final 7 more than a week ago, but we finally got the email over Thanksgiving break. No, our idea was not cool enough to make the list; but then again, there were only a couple of cool ones on the list that caught my attention.

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Thank you for participating in the AWS Start-Up Challenge! We were amazed by the innovation — and sheer volume — of the applications we received, which made choosing a handful of finalists a challenge in itself.

We’re sorry to say that your application was not amongst the few finalists. We wish you success in your start-up and we hope that AWS’ infrastructure services (Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon SQS) will help you build a strong foundation for your business.

You can read about the seven finalists at http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge.

Best wishes,

Tracy Laxdal

Amazon Web Services

Simply sign-up and start building at aws.amazon.com

Check out our tech resources at aws.amazon.com/resources

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Are we bummed? Yes and no. It’d be great to get some free money to use to test the S3 solution (which we did), at the same time, getting tied up with a bunch of investors at this early of a stage can also be distracting. As they aay… too many chefs in the kitchen… blah blah.

You know you’ve had a good night programming when the screens are glowing in a dark room, to the left I’ve got a half finished can of Red Bull and 3 empty Mountain Dew cans. To the right, I’ve got a mostly eaten Chipotle Burrito bowl. Two or three Python references manuals are on the desk and all sense of time has been lost.

I’m a huge fan office ergonomics. I have a hard time focusing unless my surroundings feel purposeful and suit all my spacial needs and I thusly spend a large amount of time setting up my work area before I start a project. Having a purpose built office in my new house has really lent me to designing a good space. On this particular Thanksgiving weekend though, I’m at my future in-laws and have found the kitchen table to be the optimal place to work. Huge kitchen table workspace with a center leaf added holds the laptop and my secondary screen. A spiffy Ethan Allen chair (though it desperately needs proper lumbar support) supports me bum. A refrigerator within reach helps productivity as well.

In the end, it comes down to this. Without a proper work space, the work suffers. Spend some time getting your place together and figuring out what you need. It really can make quite a difference.

To respond to Wei’s post, I didn’t state all my reasons for this project. As you can see, feeding two dogs (one that eats as much as the entire population of Somolia) motivates me as well:

And seeing Wei’s picture only solidifies my impressions of him over the last few months. Dog people rock. Wei and his pups are living proof of that. It’s really great to work with such motivated and solid people.