AlexHopmann.com

In building CalendarData.com the way I have, I’m doing a few wacky things.
In some ways its an experiment about how the progress of technology changes the
way that someone can develop and launch a business. First of all, I’m not
following the old model of “develop an app for a year (or 6 years) in secret
until its all perfect and then launch it to an amazed public.” With the new
site, everything is pretty much out in the open. I’ve been building it for a
couple months without announcing it, but the site has actually been up and in
public for a bit. I’ve also been rolling out changes to the site a few times a
week, sometimes more- so far today the site has already had two updates, first
to enable wiki-like functionality where you can mark a calendar as “open” so
anyone can add and edit events, and the second update to make some UI
improvements, get rid of unnecessary clutter, etc.

As I do this, to be honest the site so far looks really bad. Its still too
cluttered, the usability is poor, it needs lots of design help, and more.
However there were several factors that prodded me towards putting it up even in
such an unbaked form. First of all, lots of the functionality is already there,
and I find it useful and hope some others might too. Second, it can take a long
time for the search engines to find you and index you and its probably a good
idea to get that process going as quickly as possible. A spider isn’t going to
care about the UI, so there is no reason to hold up getting that going. Finally
I’m already learning a lot from the visitors that arrive at the site. I could
have spent a few more months designing the perfect UI, and would have been
totally wrong about how real users would be interested in the site. Now, I need
to be careful to not assume that the trickle of current visitors are
representative of the (I hope) future mass audience, but tuning a UI in the
presence of real data is a dramatically different thing from doing it in the
abstract.

So that’s how it goes for now- I’ve turned on the wiki features, so in
addition to importing a feed from some existing service you can create brand-new
calendars, and/or go add events to existing ones. In the next couple of days
I’ll add the ability to put descriptions and links into events, be notified when
changes happen to calendars you have edited, and display stats on how much you
have contributed to the community. The next goal is to get a set of people who
have actually come to the site and contributed in some way. Stay tuned as we all
see how that works out…

Calendar Feed for the day- The Seattle Art Events Calendar. Please feel free
to add your own Seattle-area arts related events to this calendar.

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