Over at my other blog, Chester Writes A Book, I wrote a piece a few days ago about the need to create a comfortable, familiar, consistent and contiguous world in which to set my story.
What I didn't realise was how important that idea is to my other great creative endeavour, Wroof! (Or maybe deep down I did but just hadn't been bothered to do anything about it.)
Wroof! is an internet Content Manager. A what? Ok. It's a way to make a website look like a magazine or on-line newspaper... sort of a bit like Blogger only a)it works, and b)it does way more.
Wroof! has been 95% finished for a very long time, but it's now so big and so complicated that each time I try to smooth out the edges so that anyone other than me can use it, I break a bit.
Last week, for instance, I broke the shopping cart, which was bad because customers could order something and pay for it, and instead of ending up back at a web page that says something like "thanks for ordering", they got an error message that went something like "No $to parameter in line 47 of mailer.php". Bad.
What I realised, though, after my CWAB piece over the weekend was that this philosophy probably more applies to Wroof! than it does to some as yet unwritten book. I realised I need to make the whole Wroof! environment familiar, consistent and contiguous so that navigating your way around its control panel (blogger calls it a dashboard, which I rather like), needs to be comfortable and intuitive.
It's something Microsoft has known for a very long time (though they seem to have forgotten with Vista and Office 2007) and it's something I bleat on about whenever I look over what other people do, but applying that to something I've done... it just didn't occur to me.
The best part is that once I started going through Wroof! screen by screen to make everything look familiar and comfortable, the whole process of finishing the bloody thing got easier. I shelved plans to rewrite it from scratch with a better design, because I realised that, other than a few bugs that I've been fixing along the way, what I have actually works. The reason I didn't think it did had more to do with the look and feel of the thing than the actual functionality.
It's a very big leap forward.
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