First steps

Screen-capture of the new wowlookwhatigot.com website ... ready for launch!  (Well, more or less)

So, backtracking a little, the first job on the list when setting up wowlookwhatigot.com (apart from coming up with the list in the first place, of course) was to design and put together the website. Having secured the domain name, I had to figure out just what the website needs to do. It was a bit of a change in perspective - the whole project more or less sprang into my head fully formed, with the concept of using crowd funding both to raise initial capital and, more to the point, secure an initial subscriber list to get things started. That meant that must of the mental effort was really focused on putting together the indiegogo.com page to raise funding, and advertising it to actually get people to visit and contribute to the project. I had to think though, what were we actually advertising? The backbone of the business itself would be the website - that's what will remain when all the crowd-funding hoo-ha has come to an end and we're left (hopefully) with a functioning business. It's the website which will become there backbone of the whole enterprise.

The goal in designing the site, then, was to come up with something that looks a bit arty and sophisticated, but hopefully not so much as to people off. Something accessible and navigable that would spark people's interest to the point where they would decide that the art itself looked worth having, and that £5 a month was a small price to pay for such groovy stuff.  The arty bit, I decided to make a bit subliminal by adopting a colour palette from an artist we both admire, Giorgio de Chirico. I was going to make the user interface very blocky and colourful to look modern and contemporary in the style of the new Windows 8 (formerly 'Metro') interface, but just as I was thinking about brightly coloured rectangles I happened to catch site of a box of arrow shaped 'Post-it' type stickers on my desk. I assembled a vertical column, one of each colour sticker, on a piece of black mount-board, scanned it, and hey-presto, a menu was born. I tweaked the colours to conform to the de Chirico palette, and twiddled about with Photoshop for a while...

So after about 3 weeks of putting together bits of design and writing web-pages (using a very old and cranky version of Dreamweaver), we have a website more or less ready to go live. Not visible to the general public yet - at the time of writing there's only a place-holder page at wowlookwhatigot.com, and I've asked a few people to review the site from the point-of-views of prospective users, but that will soon be changed - the indiegogo.com page is under way, this blog is up and running, and soon we'll be launching the whole thing for the as-yet unsuspecting public ....