It’s only right to begin with a holiday shout out—so Merry Christmas to all you Christmas’s, and Happy Hanukkah to all you Hanukkah’s. It’s been a week now since our last post…sorry to keep you in the dark like that. Since your (obviously) starving for another leftos update, we’ll do our best here to wet your appetite.

First, Our Progress:

We’re now in week 6 of development. During this phase, we’ve focused most of our efforts on 2 particular areas: Programming, and Design. Back in September we set out to hire a programmer to build our website. About a month later we found the right candidate for the job and made the hire. For the past 6 weeks, he’s been busy programming all the features that you’ll see when we launch. Generally, it’s a rule-of-thumb that these projects always take longer than expected; but surprisingly, we’ve hit every milestone on time, and are set to finish development as planned (knock on wood).  We’re really happy with the programming thus far, and are excited to have you all test out these features in Leftos Alpha.

Our other major area of focus has been design. We decided for a number of different reasons that it would be best to do the site design in-house. We had the capability, so we figured– hey, might as well save some money and make it look exactly how we wanted. Lets just say that’s easier said than done. Our first draft went well. We got through all 15 pages in 4 or 5 days, and were really pleased with the results. But one lesson you learn is that perfection is a graphic designer’s best friend…and their worst enemy.  Redesign, after redesign, after redesign. We kept making minor changes, and as we added or changed a feature, the design had to be changed as well. Last Friday, December 23rd, after 3 months of almost daily work, we finally put the kibosh on site design. Though it was kinda painful at times, we’re really happy with the outcome. It’s clean, simple, and unique, and we’re excited for you all to see it too launch.

Speaking of Launch

There was one big question that we didn’t answer in our last blog post:”When will the site launch?”. That’s a really big question, so big that we don’t even have an exact answer. Right now it’s more important that we build a great product–a functional, helpful, and intuitive website, than to rush Leftos out onto the market prematurely. Therefore, we haven’t set an exact date for launch. We do however, have a rough idea of when we think it will be ready, which will be around the second week in February. Pure coincidence (I swear), but another (Leftos-related) holiday just so happens to fall around that same time. Just don’t forget that rule-of-thumb though, that these projects always take longer than expected. So don’t mark your calendars just yet–instead just keep an eye on this here blog. We’ll keep you up-to-speed on the launch date as it nears.

From the Leftos Team, Happy Holidays Everyone.