New marketing site / beta feedback / what are roadmaps?
A rapid fire of three topics, since I’m still feeling a little bouncy from my pre-workout:
I.
I, somewhat unprompted, launched my new marketing site. It is… pretty unremarkable, intentionally so — a new font face, bigger text, but otherwise the same corpus and approach and all of that. I wrote about the marketing site during my initial efforts with it back in late Spring, but it fell under the wayside for — well, for no reason in particular. It was a high-importance, low-urgency project in the Eisenhower sense; I wanted to get the marketing site off of the core Django application that serves the actual app, but didn’t have any big timeline associated with it and so it lingered at 90% done for…eight weeks or so. I told a friend about this and they asked (rightly!) “so are you just four hours of work away from finishing it, in perpetuity?” and that got me sufficiently off my ass to finish porting the remaining pages. There are a couple things I want to do still, but it’s nice having them be small additions as opposed to increments on a very big change.
(Also, if you’re interested in adding your newsletter to the rotation of social proof right above the main CTA, let me know!)
II.
Thank you for everyone who responded with bugs and feedback on the beta interface! In addition to the slew of minor paper cuts & tweaks, the feedback (plus some shadow calls over the weekend) are perpetuating a number of bigger changes.
The biggest one: the default site behavior being “create new draft” as opposed to “modify most recent draft” is… odd. (I think this is probably a consequence of my personal writing style: I almost always am writing a new post ex nihilo when I open Buttondown, and rarely tinker around with drafts.)
I want to spend some time messing around seeing if shifting the dropdown navigation to a sidebar-esque interface that holds a ‘drawer’ of recent posts is useful. This is a shame — since I spent a few cycles messing around with a sidebar that I ended up tossing — but I think it will be time well spent.
III.
My quest against Buttondown’s backlog has reached a bit of a stalemate. My goal was to hit 200 by the end of August; we’re sitting here, mid-September, at 250. This is better than its all-time high of 300, but still not quite as far along as I’d like it to be.
I’m reminded of an intellectual exercise a few folks did at Stripe; “chaos monkey”-ing their JIRA backlog, closing tickets older than a month at random, with the justification that if it was truly important after all that time then they’d notice and re-open it.
I don’t think I want to go that far. Roadmaps can be many things, and for me it tends to be a database rather than a compass. But the database has grown rowdy, and collating things down heavily would be useful.