BricaBox Blog

There’s a phrase we keep tossing around at BricaBox HQ, and that is,

“It’s not about BricaBox…”

As platform providers, trying to enter the web publishing market, we know that what “it’s really about,” are the publishers who will use our platform. What they need isn’t BricaBox, per se, but a platform which allows them to be them and do what they want to do.

For an idea of what I mean, check out Blip.tv. Blip is a web video platform which, very smartly, decided to provide the best set of tools for serious video bloggers and episodic web video producers — not your cat-falling-out-of-the-car YouTube “producers.” With this approach in mind, they’ve built out a very respectable niche in the web video market, being the first choice for most independent producers.

Another, clearer, example of this is Wordpress. This blog is powered by Wordpress software, but I hope no one ever comes to my site and says, “Wow, I love Wordpress!” No, I’d rather hear them rave about my posts. In fact, Wordpress is so good that I’d pay them to stay behind the scenes.

So this is the approach we’re trying to take with BricaBox: don’t be about us — be about the publishers using our system.

In fact, I think this makes development a lot simpler. For example, recently Kyle came with a super creative proposal to integrate site breadcrumbs in the platform header. It was an innovative solution to the age old question in web development and design, “Where am I?”

But as gorgeous as the plan may have been, it would have been a major decision to try and pave the road there. More so, it would have made BricaBox more BricaBox — more about us.

On a normal site that’s ideal. You want people to know you for your innovations. But BricaBox isn’t a normal site. It’s a platform for publishers; and for that reason a difficult decision was made easy, and we used a more standard breadcrumbing technique. While throwing out innovation is a painful thing to do, sometimes it reminds you of your priorities.

Our priorities are our publishers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 1:22 am and is filed under BricaBox Platform, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.