stuff about autopendium

OK. That’s it’s. The site is no longer restricted to approved testers. A couple of days of tweaking, most to sort out Internet Explorer’s idiosyncrasies (don’t start me off), and come to some sort of compromise between how the various web browsers display things, and we’re done. Autopendium :: stuff about old cars is live.

Well, I say done. Honestly, there’s a bucketload of annoying little things, mostly to do with design that I’d like to tweak, but I don’t think any of them are going to significantly impact on the usability of the site, and a deadline’s a deadline.

The good thing is, unlike a magazine deadline (see When to launch), you can at least continue to tweak and improve things after you’ve gone to press, so to speak.

To begin with, I’m expecting things to be pretty quiet. I’m not planning on doing a lot of marketing (in fact pretty much none at all), just tell a few mates, and perhaps suggest they do the same. Somehow it doesn’t really seem in the old car spirit to be shouting about it.

And then hopefully a few at a time will find it useful, and then tell their mates. And so it goes. Perhaps.

I’m a perfectionist, and therefore never happy with the work I do.

For many years I worked in magazines, mostly monthlies, and there you’ve got two completely contradictory drivers. One, to do the best magazine possible; and two, to get the magazine out on deadline. You can’t do both, so you end up do neither, or choosing one.

Given the potentially dire consequences of a magazine missing its deadline (print and mailing slots, problems with advertisers and retailers, etc), you always go for the deadline.

Launching a new website is a little different, particularly if your not working for a big company which has its own internal deadline (this financial quarter, etc). When do you launch? When it’s ready. When is it ready? Well, for a perfectionist, never.

Never is not a good time to launch, so when do you go for it? For Autopendium, I’ve decided to pick two (fairly arbitrary) milestones. The first was usability/usefulness, and the second was an absence of (known) significant bugs. The second is easy (only a couple more to go), the first I judged thanks to a good friend of mine, Julian, who I got to do some usability testing.

Julian is not entirely a typical user (he knows far more about old cars than most other old car owners, and currently has about 11 of them). He also really doesn’t like using computers (though he uses one for work every day), and isn’t big on spending hours browsing the web. Oh, and prior to doing the testing I had told him a bit about Autopendium, and he wasn’t interested.

So I wasn’t expecting much from the testing, except that he would find lots of things he didn’t like, didn’t get, and didn’t want. Well, there were quite a few issues the testing brought up (nearly all now fixed), but the main thing that convinced me that I should launch now was how much he enjoyed using the site, to the extent that the testing took twice as long as expected.

So, is the site perfect? Nope! Are there lots of things I would like to improve, features to add? Damn right! Is it easy to use and useful? I think so, but please do let me know. Launch is set for this Friday (15th).

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m always pretty reluctant to sign up to new websites.

Partly it’s because too many websites make it a hassle to do so. Fill in this screen, then this one. Oh and we forgot to tell you your password can’t be less than five characters. And so on (hopefully Autopendium should take not more than 30 seconds).

But mainly it’s because I’m wary about adding stuff into the black holes that many websites behave like (and that includes most of the big ones). Sure, they want you to add this, and that, many making it easy to do so.

But try getting the stuff you’ve added back out again (even assuming they’ve let you keep the copyright) and you’ll get a big fat NO.

So, I made the decision right at the beginning that if you add information about your cars or yourself, it belongs to you. And that means if you want it back, you can have it back. At any time. No questions asked.

What about if you want to leave the site? Again, no problem. And if you want to remove your details, your vehicles and your photos from the site too, we can sort that out as well.

I hope that you’ll find Autopendium a help in keeping records of your old cars, and increase your enjoyment of owning one. But I know there are alternatives out there, and I wouldn’t want you to worry that in a year or two’s time you might want to keep track of your cars in a different way, or on a different site, only to find out that you couldn’t transfer what you’d already done.

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