Here we are.  Three weeks into our new office.  Furniture is on order but not delivered yet.  What’s here has been brought in from our homes or storage.  All four of us are working in the War Room.  Here is Mauricio working on design effects for the front-end user interface.

Here’s a good shot of the War Room.  Command Central.  Ground Zero.

Where just about everything you will see and interact with in a few months is being vetted, crafted, designed, tested, adjusted, re-tested, upgraded, and approved.

This is where ideas come to fruition.  And where they come to get buried.  The good ideas always seem to rise above the rest and prove themselves through spirited discussion.  The not-so-good ideas…well, they tend to be not-so-good and therefore discarded.

Here’s an example.  “Pimp My Plan.”  Great spirit.  Great energy.  Great fun.  Bad idea.  Why?  Primarily because the use of “pimp” as a way to describe an upgrade is a trend.  An overplayed trend at that.  When did that word start coming into the mainstream?  10 years ago or so, right?  On MTV.  Then VH1.  Then mainstream media hopped on that bus.  Matt Lauer.  Oprah.  It became part of our lexicon.  Like the Vegas mantra “What Happens Here Stays Here.”  But as we know, all fashionable things must come to an end.  As will…possibly someday soon…the use of the word “pimp” in a playful sense.

This is where the idea to break down our blogs into several categories came from.  So that our readers can easily know…and find…the subject matter that’s interesting to them.  Also, because we’re all about openness and sharing, we really wanted a way for our members to communicate with one another and share their story.  Whatever story they choose.  So we created a blog category named “Café” that will be the place for people to blog about themselves.

From time to time, we like to look at what we consider to be best practices in customer engagement, useful content, design and user flow, etc.  Here, we look at just two of the dozens of sites that provided some sort of inspiration for us.  First is the Obama campaign site.  Very rich in useful content.  Very rich in design interface and user flow.  Very simple.  Very good.  Next to that is the Mozilla Firefox site.  Again, very simple.  Great in its design to draw the eye toward the action they are promoting…downloading their browser.  Very approachable user interface.  It’s easy to get a sense of the things we value in websites…both ours and others’.

Again, no furniture.  Yet.