We’ve been called out a couple times already about not having a responsive layout here on WP Daily and it’s worth us addressing directly to our community that is obviously viewing our site here via mobile devices (which is a great thing!).
The reason we don’t have a mobile ready / responsive layout is quite simple: We decided in late November that we’d rather launch early (before the holiday season and break) and test our “sea legs” sotospeak and begin to gather feedback from the community instead of launching later and having a more “robust” and “complete” package.
We did this because we firmly believe in a very similar model to the very popular Lean Startup model that one should ‘fail fast’ and iterate based on actual learnings. There are an incredibly amount of positive reasons why a business (and a blog) should do this and as so many are often prone to never launching at all.
As a result what you see currently (since our launch only a few weeks ago – sheesh, only 18 days!) is a true MVP (Minimal Viable Product) where we took the Standard Theme, quickly built a incredibly minimal child theme, and hit the ‘Publish’ button in true startup fashion.
To be quite honest, we weren’t sure how the community at large was going to respond and we thought we’d cruise through the holiday season pretty much under the radar garnering a little attention here and there and tweaking things without much fuss.
That is not what happened.
We’ve seen an incredible amount of feedback and response – so much so that we’re re-visioncasting what our global 2013 goals are as a company which now includes WP Daily in a much more prominent role. We knew that there was a need for consistent solid editorial and news coverage for WordPress but we didn’t know it would be validated so quickly.
In any case, back to the point, our MVP Theme was stripped bare of things that we considered “non-essential” launch features, such as a responsive layout, social features, and even core architecture on the server-side of things (we have no cacheing… *gasp*) that most blogs would thoughtfully include.
Again, the point was to get it to market and solicit a response, such as things like this from our buddy Andrew:
https://twitter.com/norcross/status/285469091102326785
Ah, it’s nice to know that people care!
As a result you can be sure that the next iteration of WP Daily in terms of design aesthetic will include a sweet responsive layout that makes the most sense for our growing audience here. If you have any ideas (not just related to responsive stuff) please let us know! We deeply care about your perspective and are taking copious notes.
Thanks all. Thus ends this PSA.
And yes, it took more time to generate that meme than it did to write this post. My priorities are razor sharp folks.
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