With a design in place it’s time to start coding.  This is the stage I’ve been looking forward to the most and yet also had the most trepidation about.  I’ve decided to go ahead and use Wordpress for the full site.  It has much of the functionality we want built in already and with a few tweaks it should fit the bill.  My concern is that I’ll just about be done with the whole thing and then find some key functionality, I didn’t envision needing, being completely unsupported and having to start over on a different platform.

That’s really just a reflection of this whole process.  New ideas and challenges seem to be popping up and it all comes down to just sticking with the core principles and moving forward.  I’ve been reading a lot lately about how so many startups are crushed under their own weight as they keep adding features and never finishing a product worth launching.  I keep coming up with expansion ideas myself but I’ve decided to push them down onto a list of future features.  We will have some new features and functionality to add to the site after launch so it will continue to grow after take off.

For now it’s time to buckle down and spend some quality time buried in CSS, PHP, and XHTML.