The day has finally arrived, as we pushed out our new blog design this morning. There are still a few very minor bugs and nits to be worked out, so if you come across anything that seems broken or missing, please leave a comment and let us know!
Design and development have long been at odds on the web. It seems there’s a digital echo coming from the designer corner: complaints that “developers always screw with and break our designs.” And developers are likewise stuck in an infinite recursive loop of cursing their design partners back to their flighty, self-absorbed, and self-righteous 30″ monitors.
What does this have to do with wine? Well, nothing I guess. I don’t have a 30″ monitor. But it has everything to do with building a successful website, a goal to which Snooth is well on its way. The Web is fickle business. Once your site is stuck on the dummy train to template town, it’s harder to get off than… well, it’s difficult. So you need a plan of attack, and people (both designers and developers, as well as innocent bystanders) with enough tempered mutual respect to know when to defer.
Snooth is very lucky to have assembled a team who’ve been able to capture that kind of lightning in a bottle and slowly transform it into a great website (we think, inarguably, the best wine website there is, but horn tooting is uncalled for here). But herein lies the catch! You did know there was a catch didn’t you?
Development is easy. Design is even easier. But (a) successfully releasing a product can be darn near impossible, and (b) no matter how pixel perfect your site is, your users will inevitably come back to you with a laundry list of the first grade style “but why didn’t you do _______?” Releasing your product into the wild is both daunting and humbling, so I personally wanted to take this opportunity in my first Snooth blog post to thank all of our users, all of our blog readers and co-bloggers, and all the wonderful emails we’ve received - both complimentary and in request of expanded/improved features… we hear you, and we’re working on each and every request with due respect.
So what the heck is all this rambling getting to? Well, by popular demand (and frankly, it was in the pipeline from the start anyway) our next major feature release will be a complete overhaul of what’s currently called the “my ratings” section. This section is going to become “my wines”, and will house everything important to you from the past, present, and future (sounds Sci-Fi eh?). You’ll have a one-stop shop for all your past ratings, everything you currently own in your cellar, and anything you’ve wishlisted on Snooth (yes, that’s coming, we promise)!
Much like the Grapevine, which we love and have heard great response to, the MyWines page is sure to bring Snooth to a whole new level. So now is your chance to get in early on the action. If you have ideas for how we might make the central focal point of Snooth (wines) even better, speak now. We wont pay you, but if you send something we use, I might personally buy you love a bottle of wine.