Our end of July deadline for wrapping up the new site came and went. Here we are and it's almost September. Where are those new features we promised we'd release?!?
The shortened version is that we really want our refresh to be a seamless transition for everyone, and the redesign just isn't ready yet. Rather than unleashing a half-finished site with issues, I've decided it's best to wait until everything is working exactly like it should.
A lot of the big sites you've been on had investors and budgets of millions of dollars. They could hire entire teams to make the site awesome. We don't have any kind of corporate backing. Our ad revenue covers the monthly overhead and the funds for development have come from my personal funds, along with what some pretty awesome Muggers have donated. So, there isn't a whole team working on the site. Until this week, it's been me (not a developer), a developer, and some very wonderful Muggers who volunteered to beta test. We're still super tiny.
The developer and I worked our tails off and I felt like we had it nailed by the time the beta testers came on. No... within a day or so, our list of one project to correct grew into 10, and then to 20, and it eventually jumped over the 30 mark. These were just glitch fixes, after I thought the site was done. The beta testers have done a fabulous job of catching even obscure inconsistencies and of testing the site on pretty much every device and browser imaginable. The developer has been beyond awesome. He has come up with unique solutions to issues we've faced and implemented them quickly. There have been a lot of little things, like not being able to select people from a list to email, that he has jumped in and created great solutions for.
But, there are other issues that still remain, like when a page of comments exceeds 50,and you click a button to see the rest, you go to the bottom of the next page. O_o Not a huge glitch, but it's annoying and confusing for sure. And, some of the links in the activity and notification feeds won't jump you to the comment you want to see. You still have to search through a thread to see what you came to see. Bah.
So, it's not that the new site is "broken," but in my mind, it's unfinished for sure. You guys have done a great job of adapting to the quirks of the Mug, and that's truly something, but I want you guys to have a site that does exactly what you expect it to do. There is so much that goes into developing a site- it's truly unreal. If you think about all the steps you take on any given trip to the Mug, you probably click hundreds of times and each action you take is largely intuitive, but sometimes, you'll go somewhere and click something and you have to pause to read what steps you need to take to complete an action... and it's these little pauses that break an experience. To amplify it, each person uses the site differently, and different browsers/ devices read the code a little differently, so we're literally trying to account for millions of variables to avoid members having those "pause" moments.
To add to this, our developer recently became ill. He was gone for a whole week and mostly gone for a second. He's back, but he's still not as strong as he was. I brought on a second developer and he started yesterday, so the two will work in tandem, correcting any true glitches and eliminating "pause moments."
I am not going to paint myself into a corner by offering up another date for the refresh. Right now, the developers have a list of 22 tasks to correct, but every time they knock something out of the way, we give them five more things to correct. Some are five-minute fixes, but others are much more intensive. As it stands now, they could probably have it all done in two weeks, but if we keep finding things, I'll keep adding to their list.
I'm really proud of the redesigned site and I can't wait until we can start using it. I really believe that it is going to blow all other similar sites totally out of the water in terms of capabilities and features. If our present site is a 1960s VW Bug, the refresh that's coming is like a new Cadillac. Not the flying car of the future by any means, but sleek, stylish, well-appointed, and dependable.
We're still growing here on our live site, gaining new members all the time, and we've added more volunteers to the moderation team, helping to ensure the discussions out and about are respectful. Hopefully we'll get the refresh up and running very soon, and I've got some exciting things in the pipeline for after we get settled.
These are good, exciting times, and I thankful to be sharing them with all of you.
