Steve Kaplan

The guys at 37signals had an interesting post today.

People will often ask us “how do you find time to do PR or marketing when you are building your products?” Or “When do you find time to do customer support?” Or “How does such a small team accomplish so much? What is your time management secret?”

Here’s the secret: it’s all the same thing.

Product development, marketing, PR, support, design, programming, etc — it’s all the same thing. We don’t put time aside for PR or time aside for design or time aside for tech support. We’re always doing all of these things. They are all part of the same thing: building products we love to build.

These guys are driving home the what seems to be true of the new wave of Web 2.0 sites. What is interesting about all of these new apps is not just the problem they solve, but how great their site designs are. These are sites that have clearly been engineered at both the front-end and back-end level.

Web standards are driving this forward. Technology such as CSS makes it more deliberate to teams about who designs the Model, the View and the Controller. It makes it trivial to keep these independent and allows for designers to have real control over how the user interacts with the site. This, combined with the types of agile development methodologies pioneered by the 37signals guys, is ushering a new era of application development. In the most most recent episode of Inside the Net Dan Cederholm, of Simplebits hits on this a bit.

The other interesting point brought up in the podcast is how all of these "Web 2.0" apps look very much the same. This is probably because these interface trends (tagging, AJAX, big fonts etc.) are the best of breed right now.

I wouldn't call myself an expert on this stuff but it will be interesting in the future to see how easily web standards allow these design trends to change. Will the technology live up to the hype? Will it be as simple as swapping out CSS files?

last updated 2 years ago comment