BeerChief almost complete

I’ve just paid off the 3rd project milestone for BeerChief.

Adam, my co-pilot, is taking care of the 4th and final payment and together, we’ll have shelled out over $10,000 on BeerChief in total.

Not surprisingly (combined with my new office and my upcoming trip to London), it leaves me virtually broke, however i do plan on going on a selling spree over the next couple of weeks to get my bank balance looking somewhat ‘normal’ again. I hope to raise about $1k by selling a few new wordpress themes and some of my current crop of sites.

I have a figure that i hate dropping below and once i drop below it, i just have to get it back up…

So anyway, what does $10,000 get you or how far does it go in the current climate for average joe soaps? The answer is far enough. BeerChief is far from a finished product. It’s not perfect, i never said it would be and i never said it will be. I did however say it would be a ‘world class’ social networking site.

So what does that mean? It means it will outstrip or at least equal all other competitors on as many fronts as possible. It means that we should be able to promote BeerChief without a hint of doubt or guilt that BeerChief in any way fails to live up to the standards a social networking user expects.

You can’t compare BeerChief with many other social networks as it’s a niche social network with few competitors - fubar.com probably the only big gun. And by all means, i urge you to check out fubar, use it and then check out BeerChief once we launch. You tell me what you prefer in terms of layout, style, features, simplicity, usability etc… (don’t compare us membership wise obviously!).

We don’t have investment or business plans nor do we have a team of workers to call upon, but what we do have now is a quality site in what we believe is a large niche. It’s a recipe for success.

The site in it’s current state is good enough to launch, but we’re still being very picky and trying to enhance it all the time. There’s only so much we can do however, it has to be launched at some stage…. don’t forget we’ve signed a contract and agreed terms so we can’t ask for anything more than what’s in that contract.

But of course because BeerChief was so long in preparation, everything in the contract is near perfect… we haven’t needed to ask for anything else and that’s been a massive help.

Late in the day though, we’ve decided to scrap our header. Massive decision. The problem with it was that it was taking up too much space. I’ve spoken in the past about how we wanted to break some web 2.0 habits, but this is one thing we’ll have to let web 2.0 get the better of. We’ll save 170 pixels in vertical height with the new, simplified header and that ultimately reduces scrolling and allows us to fit more content in to a screen. 170 pixels is this much.. (height of bouncer)

It was again, another thought out decision… and that’s really been the key to making our $10,000 go as far as possible - plans, structure, debate and communication.

As for a BeerChief launch date (i knew some of you were going to ask!), everything is all on track and if i were a betting man, i’d put money on mid-June, roughly 3/4 weeks from now

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