in:focus—a case study

Written by Harry Roberts on CSS Wizardry.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

Last week I launched in:focus, and it got an amazing reception. I thought I’d write up a quick case study on the idea, the process and the project’s future…

I love the web, seriously love it. I have a burning desire to always be creating things. Nothing groundbreaking like Dribbble, but just things. I also love tinkering with code and UIs and all manner of stuff. I get an idea, I build it, I abandon it, I move onto the next one. I’d say less than 10% of the things I ever work on ever see the light of day.

in:focus, thankfully, was different. I had the idea, I started building, I got Oliver on board, I launched.

The idea was had when I was a little drunk. Me and Dan were at a bar when I had a whimsical idea for an interview project. Nothing more; just a site that hosted interviews with cool and interesting people. That night I got in and started merrily (tipsily) designing straight into the browser. Three hours later and in:focus’ design and build was done.

I decided that I needed to approach someone to interview first, and that this person would make or break in:focus. I have some really really cool followers on Twitter so I decided to source someone from there. Oliver and I have been following each other for a while now so I dropped him a DM and he said yes right away.

Oliver was an absolutely spot-on choice. Anyone who knows him, or has read the interview, will know that he’s a very interesting and inspirational guy, and he really made the first publication an instant hit.

I decided for sake of ease to port in:focus over to WordPress. This took about twenty minutes with a further hour or so ironing out any rough spots. I purposely hurried the entire process so as to a) not let the idea go stale, as so many tend to do and b) for the sheer self-imposed pressure. I love working under pressure.

I sent Oliver the questions (edited in part by Dan), he answered them, Suzanna proofed it, I put it live and you lot seemed to love it.

The moral I guess is have ideas and build. A few hours of work on my part, and time generously donated by others, and I have a project live that a lot of people seems to really enjoy. It was fun, I’m proud of the results and I’m looking forward to continuing it.

in:focus’ next steps are to simply interview more people. Over the next few months I aim to approach and interview more individuals and publish on a semi-regular basis. If anyone has any ideas as to people they like to see interviewed then just let me know!

Final thanks again to Oliver, Suze and Dan.

N.B. All code can now be licensed under the permissive MIT license. Read more about licensing CSS Wizardry code samples…

By Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts is an independent consultant web performance engineer. He helps companies of all shapes and sizes find and fix site speed issues.