Signal vs Noise Rebuilt in Squarespace CMS in 18 Minutes
squarespace.comCool video of the Squarespace guys rebuilding Signal vs Noise blog in 18 minutes on their CMS. Implementing a given design, especially when it's minimalist, is not the hard part. What's funny is when I first saw the title of this blog, I thought it was the reverse-- Signal vs. Noise (37signals) implementing SquareSpace CMS in Rails in 18 minutes. That would certainly be more interesting to me, anyway. This is "neat" - and squarespace actually looks like a great service, especially for someone who needs more than a simple blogger site, but less than custom hosting/etc. BUT! what I'd love to see is what a "regular" user could do in 20 minutes. Learning the context of the app, where things are, what menu items do exactly which function you need- that's the learning curve people need to know about. I mean, I could probably re-implement SvN in 20 minutes by skinning Wordpress- but that's because i use Wordpress all the time, and have done more skins for the thing than I care to recall. I think the point is that it's a completely hosted service and that's being done 90% from a UI -- with minimal CSS written, and no XHTML changes. The first XHTML change is 12 seconds in - and the title screen lasts 5 seconds. That's impossible, since you can't edit the XHTML behind a Squarespace site. Do you mean CSS? Weebly did this sort of thing with the website of one of the investors in the room on demo day in 07, and it had quite an impact (though they did it in about 6 minutes--I guess they did some prep work in advance). This bothers me for the reason it doesn't account for learning Squarespace. If a client saw Squarespace and wanted a design implemented, I will see you and raise your 18 minutes. Oh my god they put a skin on a blog! Somebody call the papers! I'd like to see how fast it can be done in Wordpress as well, if this is really going to have any meaning.