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Behind The Firm List Blog
One vs. Many
One of the things that I am most proud about with The Firm List, is that I
have managed to grow a site from a simple dump of my Netscape bookmark file
into the largest directory/guide of its kind on the web (that I know of).
And more importantly, it's not just that it's the largest, but that it's the
largest and best designed.
I am not going to get into a discussion right now about the design. I am
not trumpeting my design skills. There's a lot of things which could make
it better, both in functionality and design. But the reality is, that even
if the site is not a great design in your eyes, it's light years better than
what most of my competition has been doing.
I say "my competition" though I've never really felt like I was in a race or
a fight to be number one. But I have strived to be the best. Not the
biggest, but the best. Being the best is not about having the most traffic,
the most money, the most firms, etc. It's about doing everything to the
next degree about what others are doing. It's taking it further than the
point which would be fine and dandy, but just wouldn't be anything special.
When the "competition" are businesses, with money and staff, it's a nice
feeling to know that one person can do so much. It's nice to know that one
person can often see and think of things in a more efficient and perhaps
radical manner, and in the process, find a better method or solution. I
think that my focus on "browsing" as opposed to searching is a part of that.
I believe in the power and importance of searching (and I have been building
and refining the search functionality of this site, see
http://search.firmlist.com ) but search isn't as closely entwined with the
structure of a site as browse is. By that I mean that search does place
constraints and structure around data, but it doesn't have as tight a
connection with the display of data. Browsing does. Which makes it so much
more difficult to try and add browse after the fact.
So, by starting with browsing, I set the framework for how the information
would be displayed and navigated on the site, and search simply allows you
to sift through the data without the need to navigate.
What browing allows, is an open door to the multi-faceted ways people
approach a site and its information. There's something to be said for how
Yahoo approached cataloging the web and how other search engines have. Both
allow you to search for a keyword, but if your just wandering through a
topic, looking for something to catch your interest or for something you
can't put a name to, browsing is the only option.
Browsing allows for uses you never planned for. Searching pretty much
expects you to know what you're looking for, and it's something you plan out
in advance of construction.
I won't go too much further with this than to say I believe this site's
gotten as far as it by being easy to use for a hundred different reasons by
hundreds of different people, all of which I couldn't have come up with in
advance, let alone managed to plan & build to accomodate after the fact.
And this "wait and see" attitude has benefitted me greatly, but
unfortunately for my "competition" as businesses or looking to be
businesses, they rarely had that luxury of waiting and seeing how people use
the site, and growing & changing constantly.
