One of the best things that can happen to a group of people working on a project for a while is to see it bloom and become something real. Since late January we’ve been working with the awesome guys over at ACS on a product we’re very proud of - Siteblimp. We’re not going to tell you a lot about it for now because it’s not the right time yet, but I’ve decided to post 3 tiny screen grabs to catch your eye, and tell you a little about the things we loved and hated during the time.

The things we loved:

Trust: how ACS trusted us with their idea and always kept an active discussion about what to do and when to do. Developing passion: we became infatuated with the ideas and world of the people the application will serve, even though we didn’t belong at first. Agility: how the tools we used enabled us to change rapidly if we made mistakes. Simplicity: it’s a simple idea, and a simple application - it will not rock your world or build a whole new internet but it’ll help a specific kind of person do what they do best.

The things we hated:

Dependency: having to depend on 3rd parties to succeed is always a bad thing - in this application, we depend on one of the internet giants and their decisions, something which bit us in the ass a few times, and probably will as well in the future. The unknown: undocumented features, unsupported instructions on what should be an extremely powerful API - did we say dependency is bad enough times?

The things we’ll definitely do more of:

Work late hours when the day is being productive. Rest, when we’re too tired to keep looking at lines of code. Document progress, because even agile development needs some sort of standing platform. Communicate, because the very few times communication was lost, we lost time as well.

Final words:

So, Siteblimp will be launching soon - we’ll be sure to tell you when it does. We’re excited to be launching products, and already have a few more lined up (including GoPlan, which you can read about on this site’s Work section), which will be a lot more open to discussion on the blog (because this project in particular is only being spoken of now, publicly, for the very first time).

By the way, you should definitely have a look at ACS’s weblog Pronet Advertising where they’ve been sharing their views on what you may call Marketing 2.0 and SEO - and pay attention to their running series on Getting Ranked that talks about finetuning your websites and web-applications to get better results on search engines.