Yesterday, one year ago a little website launched. The three cofounders had been working on the site for almost a year prior to the launch. The site’s name was Skritter and it was the brainchild of one Nick Winter, and the adopted child of George Saines and Scott Erickson. Through a lot of work and attention to what you (our users) have told us, we’ve made this last year very productive.
On this occasion, we would like to invite you to take a moment and look back at how far things have come since last year. Here is our landing page on May 12th 2009:
You’ll notice that we were still using our old demo video (although obviously you can’t see it in motion in the screencap), the blog leader was visible, and so were the testimonials. That has been shuffled and reshuffled since then. Perhaps the biggest change we’ve made in the interim is shortening our landing page so that it now fits in 768 pixels.
Here’s what the practice page looked like back then:
Lots has changed since then: you’ll notice the flash is on the right side of the screen, there are 6 buttons (rather than the current 5), the tone buttons hadn’t been redesigned, there were no grading buttons, the magnifying glass for dictionary lookup hadn’t been built, information about the scheduling was in cryptic format, no active lists/settings dialogue, no manual add button, and the strictness button was still languishing beneath the flash. There was no hidden pinyin support, reading practice, definition practice, tone colors, or stroke order animations, to name a few of the features developed over the last year.
On the eave of yet another big update (check out this month’s newsletter on the 15th for more info), it is nostalgic to look back and see what used to be. And so with a little tear in our eye, we wish Skritter a happy first birthday and extend a thank you to everyone that has so generously helped us reach this milestone. We have awesome users and there’s no way we could have built this site without your help!
