That Announcement Was Premature

More than a few weeks ago, I proudly announced at "Wroof! Is Coming". I even set a date, August 24. I blew my trumpet long and loud. "Brilliant", "Inspired", "Stunning". The dictionary of superlatives was depleted.

And then I hit a bump... a crash of Photoshop which I was using to tidy up some graphics.

It was then that I realised that Wroof! just wasn't good enough yet. I say "yet" because it will be all of the things those superlatives describe. In many ways, is IS all those things, but not entirely.

You see, it isn't finished, and by "finished", I mean polished, shiny and very warm to touch.

It took a tiny little bug to make that penny drop. It was something to do with the way Wroof! handles shopping carts, and as I was trawling through lines of code looking for the error, I started to see some big design problems.

For example, Wroof! lets you choose fonts and colours for your pages. On testing, I discovered that the method for passing the page reference from one page to the next was flawed. It wasn't a bug... it worked exactly the way it was supposed to... it just didn't do the job required. It needed to be fixed, and the fix meant combing a hundred thousand lines of code to insert a page reference whenever your site's visitor moves from one page to the next. Boring, time consuming, and a pain in the rear end.

There have been more like that... errors in logic or design that haven't bothered me in creating our company websites, but which would break your patience if you tried to use it.

As if those issues weren't enough, I looked at the two pages where you get to decide how your website will look... the two most important pages in the whole thing... and they sucked. Big time. Really sucked. They were clumsy, unintuitive and clunky. Wroof! has to be better than that so a rewrite was required. It was a timely reminder of one of my mantras... "if you're going to do something, spend a little more time and do it right".

Wroof! is still coming... but I've put the date back a little... to October 1. Given the history of the last few weeks, I'm not going to set that in stone... but I'll be bloody pissed off if I need to push that date back again.