Kindo Family Blog

The big problem with building web apps is that you run the risk of doing too much, or too little. Seems obvious, but there’s a very fine line.

In todays world of limited attention spans, building too little means that people don’t come back; whereas if you try to build too much, you might never actually get there (for many reasons).

So this week has been all about making sure that we know what we’re building, and also that it makes sense to people outside of our team. After all, we’re a bunch of tech geeks that would probably be considered on the bleeding edge by most folks, so naturally we have to make sure that we’re not overdoing things.

To do that, I’ve been focussing on what the product is going to look like when we launch, and then making sure that those ideas are OK’d by a focus group. Turns out that our ideas about the way data and information should be interacted with (thanks primarily to Thomas’ work) were spot on, but some of our ideas about what people want in a web application weren’t. That’s great, because it means we can keep polishing our ideas to make them useful to our users!

We’ve got a budget allocation, which we obviously need to work within, so today a large part of my time was dedicated to making sure that we’re within budget and that it makes sense. I’m going to step back for a while to make sure that I haven’t left anything out

Also spent some time working on the sitemap, although not as much as I would have like to have done… More on that tomorrow.

There are a lot of things to think about when doing a new web page. I guess I started off by doing a site map of what the new page possibly could contain.

As the page will be in many languages and published allover the world, it has been necessary to do a lot of research. That’s the main thing I have been doing.

I started with trying to find out how people get their names in different countries. In Sweden for an example, where I’m from, the parents give their children a name that they think is nice and most of the times also a middle name. In Sweden, a name is just a name, and have most of the time no spiritual meaning or so.
The surname that the children will get is most of the time from the father. Although, in my case, my parents took my mothers surname instead, because they thought it would be boring to have such a common surname as Andersson.

To be able to manage this project, we need some help by students from different universities in Europe. I have tried to find the best suitable universities, and have also posted job descriptions there, so that the students can see it and contact us.

A way to get a big project like Kindo launched successfully and to get the site tested by lots of different people is to find a variety of people that might be interested in genealogy and family life. I have tried hard to find those people and finally we’ve got a long list of people that we will contact.

Another thing I have been doing is to find genealogy pages that already exists, where we can get information and learn from.