Chris Olsen

I am happy to announce the launch of Onlinelistings. The purpose of the site is to allow realtors to create professional web pages that are easy to use for them and their clients.

This project was one that took a little longer than I initially estimated due to some factors outside my control and others that I never handled the way I should have. Below are a few tips to increase your chances of success, that I failed to remember while working on the project.

1. Get the least amount of work done first

   When working on even a small project the list of todos can begin to grow quickly and suddenly that small project becomes quite large. Features redefine the f-word ie. can really feature things up. What happens, is a good idea grows into something that seems to be required, which then results in the completion date being extended by a week or so. Add a couple more of these features and you have just added a month to the project. To prevent extended completion times determine what the core functionality is and work on nothing but that.

2. Establish a user base right away
   

   Without users even the best application is worthless. So get the core done, get it on the web then get people interested. Receive input from the users then make improvements to what has already been done. The benefits of this is that you get users that are interested, you get feedback from a different perspective than your own and you have a solid base to expand on.

3. Ignore the 20 percent

   There is always going to be the few, which includes you, that request the interesting features. Some of these suggestions may seem to make sense at first, but there is a good chance¹ that the people that are requesting these features are the same people that purchase items like the vibrating knife to later discover that they don’t need it as much as they thought they would. Don’t be afraid to say no to certain requests. If interest continues to grow over time then it might be time to re-examine things.

Hopefully this reminder will help someone else from making the same mistakes that I did.

If you know any realtors that have a site that is hard on a person’s eyes I would appreciate it if you sent them my way.

1. This statement is backed by absolutely zero data

Tonight I was working away at a Tim Horton’s, since it is a change from my normal working space (their coffee is really not very good), when I get a message on my cell phone from a friend. The message read “Uh-oh, you’re in trouble”, followed by a link. It has been quite a while since I felt that sick that fast.

A site that I created a couple days ago was on the front page of wilbit.com and not in a good way. The reason was a simple one, I just violated the 11th commandment.

I created a small app (~8-10 hours of work) to allow me to track my spending since tax time coming up and who wants to use a spreadsheet to enter data where a web application could do the same thing. So, of course, that is what I have to do.

I have this issue with creating apps that I can’t do it with no styles, it seems to through my focus out the door. I like to have things looking nice while creating. I didn’t feel like designing something since it would have doubled the time required on the app so I copied the beanstalk app layout.

After inserting some of my transactions I figured before I wasted too much time I should just make it a public app, because maybe, just maybe there is someone else out there that would use it, and after all I have a extremely slow site5 account that I already paid for a year upfront that I am not using, so why not. So I added the ability to create an account, made a couple of quick fixes and deployed.

I guess I didn’t put myself in the other person’s shoes to whom I copied from and I really really apologize for it. Sometimes when you get the deployment rush, even for small apps like this, your primary goal is to get it up on the sever and you lose sight of other important things.

The worst thing is that I only told three people about the app, two friends and my mom. Oh, the humiliation.

I wish I would’ve checked my email earlier and took care of things before the blog post was made, but that is a lesson to me in trying to manage my time better my keeping my email turned off while I am working.

Once again my apologies to Chris Nagle* and the team at Wildbit.

*Owns and operates Wilbit, that has created Beanstalk. Beanstalk is a really good app for keeping your projects on, and highly recommend it to anyone that hasn’t caught the Git bug that is going around.