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Today marks the first week we’ve had our site up. It’s still in a somewhat Beta version, although the perfectionist in me cringes to say that. But overall, I’m glad that we don’t have any “under construction” pages with cheesy tractors or cranes or teaser “coming soon” features. Personally, I don’t like websites with dead-ends. But there is still a lot of work to do, including some finer proof-reading and some revision of our home page. We’re shooting for a more finished and completed site on October 31st.

Then again, a website like ours will always be a work in progress. We’ve got a lot of creative ideas that we’re itching to act on. In some ways, we feel like kids in a toy shop. Which one do we play with first?

Actually, the blogosphere was the first toy we picked and we’re still figuring out how to play with it. We tend to jump into things and figure it out as we go. This blog is no exception. We still have a lot of questions and issues to work out, but its great to have a vehicle to share our journey as we go.

Even getting this far has been Herculean, mainly because we needed to really get a clear focus on what our website would accomplish. We looked at a lot of websites, mostly ones outside of the real estate industry. And we read a lot of Seth Godin’s writing. His ideas resonated with our thoughts on marketing and have helped crystallize our thinking.

I can’t sing the praises of our design group, EMRL, enough. Not only for their intuitive design instincts but also for their patience and persistence and collaborative ethos. We’re a challenging client because we tend to be far more involved in the process and details than most. There’s a reason my bio heading says, “he’s a bulldog about getting things right.” This probably slows us down but it also means that we end up with a truer and better (we hope) end result.

Part of me wishes we’d waited to launch until after the 31st but another part of me thinks its good to have a working draft that we can test and see what does and doesn’t work. Sometimes working on a site when its not live keeps you from seeing some of the most glaring problems. The pressure of public access keeps you sharp.

That said, if you notice glitches, errors or anything that would make the site more functional, let us know. You can comment below or email me.

Jason