.NET, Software - Sunday, November 11, 2007 22:15 - 0 Comments

Simple programming can be hard but it’s worth it.

I recently launched a new site off some old ideas I had. I decided that I didn’t have the time to engineer yet other typical site with logins, account management, features, features, features etc. I wanted to keep the barriers to usage extremely low - since my site was going to be radically different, why lets users leave because your site wasn’t fast enough. I guess this is more about a simple site rather than simple code - which is a whole other story!

This is a short study on what took to build Mafooku and what appears simple sometimes isn’t. Take a look at the site for reference: Mafooku - Top 10

I started off the usual way, lets get the basics done for any site. So here was the initial list of things I thought my site needed. I’ve broken each section down into the initial “bad” list and then the final “good” list.

1. We’re posting products so we’re going to need an login to edit products.
2. If you need a login you need registration.
3. Now I needed password/account recovering pages.
4. Product edit/save page.

Woah … look at that list. To post a single product the user must first register, remember yet “another” username and password, understand their account layout and finally try post a product. Many users would have given up already so I narrowed down the list to just

1. Let the user post a product.

A single page, short sweet with limited fields and just one image. Everything you need to get a seller interested in your products. So that may have seemed easy enough but we have a problem now. How does a user edit or re-post a product or more importantly delete it if it isn’t relevant anymore?

You need some creative thinking for this. A user can remove their product because when it is posted they get an email with an encrypted link to disable the product. Since only they have that email it acts like an account. The same idea applies to editing or in my case - just re-posting with updated details.

So from my initial list, item 3 wasn’t ever needed. Item 4 was really just item 1 simplified for the user so no extra coding here. Item 2 again wasn’t needed. There are now no barriers to usage, the site will be faster and much easier to understand.

I applied the same to the actual product listings. Categories etc just get too big for users to really navigate and search, when done right, can help a lot - is it really simple? I decided for this site, no. If you can’t see what we have within 1 click (no typing!) then it isn’t simple enough. Hence the front page items and a list of the last 100 and nothing else.

The actually programming behind the scenes was a bit more complex with some advanced caching, plenty of security and encryption but still remained a small size code base because I never stuffed the site with un-needed features.

-c