ImThere Blog

Back in November, we reached a crossroads with ImThere where we had to decide if we wanted to keep pushing forward with the site we had launched just 2 months prior, or scrap and completely rebuild it. We opted for the latter. Sure, we could have kept working to add in the missing functionality, improve the usability, and smooth out the kinks. After all, we had just spent the better part of a year and tens of thousands of dollars to develop it. Why would we make the seemingly illogical choice that we did?

It didn’t feel right.

It wasn’t poorly made, and it certainly looked pretty, but it just lacked the undefinable quality that makes a site fun and addicting. So, after some deliberation, we went back to the drawing board and painstakingly planned out the site we should have been building from day 1. The truth is, no site is quite right when it first launches. Unfortunately, we found that our problems ran pretty deep into the site’s structure, and couldn’t be fixed with a simple revision. Fortunately, we realized that early on, and now we’re well on our way to the launch of an ImThere that I firmly believe you’ll all want to be involved with. I know that’s a bold statement, and some of you shrugged it off when I said it in a prior blog, but I think you’ll be surprised.

This is the first of a series of blog entries that will lead up to the launch of the new ImThere. Figuring out that it had to be rebuilt was only the first step. In future entries I’ll discuss how we’ve tackled expansion, melding a service with a community, mobile integration, usability, and other issues that needed solving for ImThere to feel right.

Oh, and trust me, it’s going to feel more than right :)