So as some of you may know, or not know, I recently became a part owner of a little startup based in texas, Seekum.com. I’m only a minority stakeholder/shareholder, but I am the new creative director for said startup. With that in mind, I am going to create a tangential series here on the designing of a search engine (from a GUI/interface perspective, not code, that I leave to Mike and Ramsey to discuss that end). Seekum for those of you not aware is a social search engine that uses continuous live user feedback to help refine the search queries you get from standard searches.Anyway, this is going to be a multi-part series, in each section/installment I will discuss the different parts of the site and why I chose to design it that way. I will also try and discuss the business reasons for each design choice as they become relevant.In the meantime, you can play around with the unstyled version of seekum.com by clicking here.

When you are building a web based application, you have to put a lot of thought into what gets into each screen, you can't go throwing the kitchen sink in there just because you can. So my current dilemna is that I am limited by the fact we're trying to design for flexibility and usability at the same time. This is a quesion the average user never thinks about, but its something i've been spending alot of time on lately. These are questions every developer faces, and they may seem like little issues here and there, ... Continue reading