Terry Rydzynski

In this series of posts, I will be taking you through the rough elements of the process for developing an Adult Social Website (think Adult Friend Finder, Adultspace etc but way better!). I cant reveal the details about the site just yet, but I am hoping to give you more when we get closer to Beta launch. We expect the site to be ready for public consumption around March/April 2008. I know that sounds like a long way off, but we have so much to do before the site is ready.

We have now finished developing the site’s flow on paper, so we have a really good idea of how we expect people to move around on the site. Although we employed a development company to build the site for us, it is crucial that we acted as the architects to a large degree to ensure that the developers understood exactly what we wanted. Dont think for a minute that I dont trust our developers, because I do - I think they are an excellent bunch of guys who know their stuff, but in my experience of commissioning software development in the past, and also developing software on behalf of other people, there is always a huge element that is open to interpretation. When specifying a new development - expecially one thats costing upwards of £25,000 (£50,000 USD), you need to make sure you know exactly what you want before you ask for it. With so much at stake, I wanted to leave as little up to interpretation as possible. With that out of the way, we are just waiting to receive a functional and technical specification from the developers which will outline their interpretation of our requirements. Even though we have been as thorough as possible in our specification and met the developers numerous times, I guarantee there will be some functionality that hasn’t been interpreted as we orignal conceived it - its par for the course!

While we await the specs from the developers, we have also been sent some interesting design concepts and logo ideas that look really good. I expect we’ll go back and forth a few times before we get close to a final concept, as its really difficult to sum up an entire site in a single logo!

That said, I’m really impressed with what has been sent over so far.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures up here soon to show you the direction we are heading.