Eagle-eyed view­ers will have noticed that (at time of writ­ing) that there is the some­what telling word ‘beta’ secreted into the web­site masthead. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this is because, well frankly, the site isn’t fin­ished yet.

There’s LOADS still to do — most of the rooms still need fur­nish­ing, there are still parts of the house where wir­ing and plumb­ing are exposed, and although the bulk of the work is done, cer­tainly behind the scenes, I still have to make my mark on the place and get nicely settled in. I’ll have a house­warm­ing party when everything’s finally ready, but it’ll be one of those events where every­one had already vis­ited at least once before that night; step­ping over pack­ing crates and ensur­ing they don’t lean on any fresh-painted walls.

Website betas have always been around, it’s only (fairly) recently that developers have finally stepped up and pub­lic­ally admit­ted “yeah, we’re still work­ing on it, but please, look around and tell us what you think”. flickr is pos­sibly one of the best examples of this, but vari­ous Google apps and the Hotmail inter­face have all had the beta treat­ment. Public test­ing, I feel, is far and away one of the best ways to really ‘bed in’ a site, and ensure that your users are really get­ting the max­imum benefit.

I love the beta-testing phase. Whenever I develop a web­site as part of a per­sonal pro­ject I try to open it up to every­one as early as pos­sible. Why get just a hand­ful of people — friends and col­leagues that know your styles and meth­ods, when you can encour­age poten­tially the whole planet to pick apart your site, tell you what they like and don’t.

If you’re thick-skinned enough to take the cri­ti­cism this can be an invalu­able tool. That’s why, even when this site is clearly nowhere near com­ple­tion, I’ve opened it up to the pub­lic already. This is not going to be a ‘design by demo­cracy’ site, I can’t ima­gine any­thing worse. Consider yourselves Advisors to my President, Jimminy Crickets to my Pinocchio, Grand Viziers to my Sultan. I’ll just sit here, listen­ing to your advice, pol­ish­ing my genie’s lamp.

If you see some­thing you like — tell me, if you see some­thing you hate, tell me. As the site grows and evolves, you can sit back, happy in the know­ledge that you were instru­mental in shap­ing the look and feel of the place.