Late 2004: I buy the Sampa.com domain and put up a one page that said "Good things to come..."
Mid 2005: I put a 5 content page website talking a bit about Sampa. It was a plain mostly white site.
May 2006: I launch a "better" site w/ the sign up pipeline.
September 2006: We go into our Blue-phase, with a very blue website.
August 2007: We launch the current site, created by our marketing agency.
Now, March 2008 I'm working on the 6th version of the website with better copy, better images, easier navigation, friendlier to search engines, etc.
The interesting thing is that our main website (www.sampa.com) is just a "marketing vehicle" for you to "buy" (sign up) to Sampa and create your site. After that it's unlikely you'll ever go back to it, which is contrary to most web 2.0 companies where the "core" website is the destination.
All 6 versions might look like a lot of work spent (except by #1), to just re-work it later, but you have to accept change and once you assume no piece of code/design will last longer than 3 years, you start to think differently.
That was my m.o. at Microsoft. Write as if the code will be obsolete in 3 years. At Sampa, I'm a bit more aggressive in some fronts and I don't think our website will last longer than one year.
Because I think like that I could write the code in a way that makes it very easy to drop a new visual on top of it. The hardest re-design which was between #4 and #5, took just about 3 days. And this redesign I expect to take less than 2 days (today and tomorrow).
The one thing I can say if you are a web developer is to do not buy the BS of separation between content and style. If you do that you'll end up w/ a gigantic unmaintainable CSS (I've seen that CSS file in some startups). I write most repeatable styles in CSS and most non-repeating styles in the HTML. The core idea is that you have to keep CSS small and relatively easy to understand, and that you can change the HTML (+Styles), the CSS or the content almost independently of each other.
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) is just a "marketing vehicle" for you to "buy" (sign up) to Sampa and create your site. After that it's unlikely you'll ever go back to it, which is contrary to most web 2.0 companies where the "core" website is the destination.
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November, 2007