I run the Fashion Mash website, together with mezamashii, and lately I have been spending a lot of time thinking about where to go from here.
The reality is that we made a lot of mistakes during the development of Fashion Mash. We started down a promising path with a utility concept, but wandered astray into a fashion-based world that we had very strictly meant to avoid. Even the name was, in retrospect, a poor and misleading choice. This was never meant to be a fashion site but a wardrobe utility.
As a result of our many misjudgements, the site became something of an unwanted child, a poor lost project with differing taste and opinions from its parent creators. It has been neglected and left to fend for its own for many months as our attentions turned to projects more exciting or practical.
The thing is, though, that in spite of our downright abusive neglect towards this poor little website, it has still managed to keep puttering. We routinely get new signups and there is active, though somewhat anemic, community participation. There are frankly so many things wrong with the website in its current state that I'm amazed it still manages to pick up several users a week.
All of which leaves me in a bit of a quandary. The site itself still has quite a lot of untapped potential. It may never be the next Facebook, but it is certainly a concept that people seem to find attractive and, at the moment, there's only a smattering of competition. I'm certain that with a major overhaul based on all that we've learned so far, the turnover and community participation rates could be greatly improved. Of course, that would be a lot of work, and without the interest to drive that effort it becomes a mere drudgery.
And that, I suppose, is the real problem. We've fallen out of love with the site itself, and our obligations to it feel like exactly that; a sense of forlorn duty rather than one of excited passion.
As I often do in these cases, I turned to the Lucky Honu Oracle in hope of inspiration. While I have no belief in its mystical capacity, I find the presentation of a presumptuously authoritative answer to be an excellent jump start to the introspective process. My gut reactions to its prophecies frequently tell me a lot about my true feelings on the matter.
Unfortunately, this hasn't yet opened up any new wellspring of insight into my problem. Devote energy into fixing the site and hope the spark rekindles, or let it lie dormant and let bygones be bygones?
I wonder what the legal precedent is for divorcing a website.
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