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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Design
New Pure Adapt Site and…We’re Hiring!
Over the years we’ve unfortunately neglected the PureAdapt.com website. Aside from changing a few bits of information, we hadn’t updated the design since the 2008 redesign. For better or worse there’s always been something more important to work on, and the old site got the job done, so we just left it. However, as we started to discuss our hiring plan, we realized that the Pure Adapt website all of a sudden became a more important piece of the puzzle. We needed something that showcased our work, our personalities, and our culture. Finally this past weekend we launched a new … Continue reading
New Blog Design
About six months ago I decided it was time to start working on a new design. I had, what I thought, was a crazy cool idea. Of course, I never got around to it because, well, my blog design isn’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. This weekend I decided to sit down and take the little that I had done over that six months and put together a new theme. I didn’t much stick to the original idea because I realized it would probably never get done (or, my work wouldn’t get done). My main goal … Continue reading
A Big Week for LockerPulse
Last week we completed our revamp of LockerPulse. On Wednesday we launched our re-design, on Friday we completed our source project, and I spent the last few days tying up a few loose ends and debugging a few minor issues. By my count, in total there were about 40 changes – design/UI improvements, feature improvements, and fixed bugs – and 567 new news sources added, bringing the total number of sites that we’re indexing to around 1400. If you’re interested in checking out the Premium Version, this link is good for free access for life for the first 100 people … Continue reading
Designing the New Detailed Image Home Page
Yesterday we launched a new home page for Detailed Image. Here’s what the old home page looked like: And here’s the new one: In retrospect, Mike and I both thought that we had taken several steps backwards with our last few home page designs since we re-launched the entire site about 15 months ago. We wanted to bring back the emphasis on our products and all of our sales without overloading the user with text. We also wanted it to be a bit more eye-catching. Maybe a better way to look at this redesign is to look at just the … Continue reading
Why Continuous Learning is Important
I think one of the key indicators of whether you chose the right career is your level of passion to continue to learn and evolve as things change. Case in point, for the past month or two Mike and I have been obsessed with learning CSS3 and HTML5, both of which are becoming more and more usable in more and more browsers (see this nifty little chart for a full breakdown). I find myself getting sidetracked at night, hopping back on my computer to see if anyone has done X, or when it will be possible to do Y. I … Continue reading
The LockerPulse 30 Day Update…on Day 15
I’m breaking my own rule about waiting 30 days before issuing any updates to a new web project, but it’s with good reason. Mike will be heading to China for a month-long vacation starting Saturday and I wanted to work with him to push out the changes rather than try to go at it solo (things tend to come out much better when we do that…) There were also several common threads in the feedback we received that pointed out some problems that I wanted to try to fix sooner rather than later. I do feel a bit bad about … Continue reading
The Result of 6 Months of Iterative Design on LockerPulse
When I first built the demo of LockerPulse to show my partners last December, I decided to only have one team that actually functioned. I hadn’t worked out a lot of the efficiency issues, and we didn’t have a separate server, so I didn’t want to use our resources on pulling in news for 122 teams when one would suffice to prove the concept. I chose the Buffalo Bills because Greg is a super-hardcore-crazy-obsessive Bills fan. Since that day, he’s used the site every day for his news. This is what he started with: This is what we will be … Continue reading
Programming or Design – Which Comes First?
Over the past few years, Mike and I have come up with a pretty good design and development process. I think the new Detailed Image site is proof of that. I mean, we built a pretty awesome e-commerce platform from scratch in less than five months while still performing most of our day to day responsibilities. It always interests me to hear how other companies do things, especially because we’re starting to learn that we do things different than most. It’s not that our way is necessarily better or worse, but just that we solved the problem our way, which … Continue reading