I guess I forgot to tell you that our team has grown by 50%. We were 2, now we are 3. We hired Roy Leban (ex-SchoolSoft, ex-Microsoft, ...) as the in-house User Experience guru. Roy started two weeks ago with a challenge: how to fix everything that I've broken!
I've learned a lot about user-experience (UX) on the last 8 months, since I first met with Hillel Cooperman (Jackson Fish Market). It quickly became clear that I knew near nothing about UX. I didn't even knew the things I didn't know. Fast forward 6 months, and I know way more about UX. I know the basic mistakes I've made, I know the basic rules I've broken.
So, we went on a quest to find somebody that could help us with regards to that, and by coincidence Roy became available at the perfect time, with the exact skill set that we needed.
Over the last two weeks Roy has been mocking up screenshots of how things should look. Turns out that we have more than 400 unique screens, and that excludes any error message or content (static) screens. Of course Roy is not going to Photoshop each screen.
The idea is to create an overall user experience to somebody building a site with Sampa that is consistent with what we are trying to be (a personal website service), and that has a unique visual language that makes us standout from the crowd.
The redesign will be awesome. It's 180 degrees different from what we have and it's different from anything else on the web as well. Which means it will either be an instant success or not, and, in a startup, a quick feedback loop is the best thing you can get.
So today, I started coding parts of the redesign. We don't have any of the visual language yet, but we have an overall idea of how things will work. That redesign will make us throw out about 60,000 lines of code (15% of our codebase), and the rewrite will take another 40,000 lines or so. My estimates is that it will take between 8-10 weeks to write those 40,000 lines of code (5,000 lines/week), which would put us at a launch date around mid-January. However, as with any software-cost estimate, this one is probably wrong.
Stay tuned and I'll keep you informed of our progress.
PS: Did I ever say how much I hate IE 6? Worst browser ever.
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
