smingl.com!

It's finally live - but only as a beta site. It feels a bit like your first drag on a cigarette - a lot of anticipation, a brief high and then a nasty sore throat. Yes, it was exciting to go live but immediately the nasty gremlins were back screwing up functionality that worked fine on the development site and fell over once it went to the live site. You find this stuff out gradually - it's not like there's a little active X control that you can set up to whizz round the site to tell you where drop-down menus don't work or where photographs are still showing up as cartoons not photos. Gradually we're discovering them and beating them into submission but still they come. My best analogy is to compare these little gremlins to a snagging list on your dream home. The house looks great, it has the right number of rooms, the kitchen's all shiny and new but the tap on the top floor doesn't work and the door into the sitting room gets stuck and there's a big fat hole just by the backdoor that you have to remind people not to trip into.

Anyway, here are the exciting bits of setting up a new site - every day you can check to see if anyone new has signed up. I have an easy way of doing this because their thumbnails appear along the bottom of the landing page so new thumbnail = new user. To start with there were no new thumbnails and just the same picture of me and my lead developer reappearing again and again but now, excitement is mounting as I spot new people turning up on the site. I don't know who some of them are or how they found us but I hope they like the site and I hope they're telling their friends.

Next step is to fix the XXX???!!!! remaining gremlins then get our payment system live then prepare the site for a full launch in the early Autumn. In the meantime I have to be patient (not one of my strengths) and try not to blow my top every time another gremlin comes and chews at the site. What I want to do is scream at my developer for not having everything fixed by now and sulk at my friends for not signing up after a couple of pleading emails. What I have to do is accept that it takes time and patience and it will all come good in the end.

Will post with more news soon ....