Posts filed under “Judy’s Book”
Post-Release
The last week has been a hectic one at Judy’s Book. We released an update to our deals site on Monday and most of the week has been spent in addressing the numerous issues that come up post release. Dave and the engineering team did a fantastic job identifying and then whittling down our bug [...]
Release Day Rocks
I love the stress associated with the day of a big release. You’re running around trying to sort out last minute issues, getting bugs ironed out, making sure your data is in the right place and your marketing team is anxiously waiting for the site to be live so they can start their work. It’s [...]
Don't forget about your Ops Team
You’re not done until it’s tested, deployed and running. When working hard to build a site you think users will rave about, it’s critical to not lose sight of the operations support required to test, deploy and keep your site running. The best site in the world is a complete waste of time if pages [...]
What he said…
Dave has a great post up about transitions and he talks about folks at Judy’s Book going above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that work gets done and things get fixed, even as they were moving on to other things. I’m in violent agreement with Dave on this one. People have [...]
New Features on Judy's Book
Over the past few weeks, we released and iterated upon a number of features on Judy’s Book aimed at user convenience and making it easier to get and track deals you care about. Deal Bookmarking and Tagging This features allows a user to save deals with notes and tags and then review them at their [...]
User Engagement – Measuring the right things
When you’re evaluating whether or not your site is meeting its user engagement goals, it’s important to look at the right metrics. What’s right for a social network is not right for a search engine. By the way, if you’re not measuring things like visits, page views/visit, time on site, etc you should start immediately. [...]
Local Deals Up and Running
We’ve been heads down for a while working on getting local deals into Judy’s Book and we released the latest iteration of our site last night. Naturally, it’s not perfect, but I’m excited about what we have put together. The real proof will be in how our users react. One of the coolest things for [...]
Is your test engineer a sadist? (don't worry, that's a good thing)
Over the past few days, I was working with our test engineer as he was putting an upcoming release through it’s paces. I was feeling pretty good overall but I also knew that we were bound to have a bunch of issues that needed to be addressed before we were in a position to contemplate [...]
Local Is Hard – Consumer and content-related challenges
Building a successful local website is hard and there are tough problems to overcome on the business and consumer fronts. I’ll focus on the consumer side in this post. If you’re interested in some of the local business related challenges,¬†Dave Naffziger¬†has a great post on the challenges of breaking even in the local space, that [...]
Change is hard (but worth it)
There’s a new article on Techcrunch about our strategic shift from being a local review pure play to focusing on deals and saving users money. From the article: Judy‚Äôs Book, in contrast, made some fairly dramatic strategic changes last fall, in the hope of avoiding the same fate. They de-focused on local reviews, and went [...]