Ryan Christensen — Your friendly neighborhood web specialist

Those of you that have known me for a long time know that I’ve been planning to launch a Pacific Northwest oriented local news/event/resource site (called Start Northwest) for a long, long time.

It’s almost become an inside joke. Once you consider that the website has been in the planning (and development) stage since September 2003 — almost five years — you start to see the absurdity. The project has seen redesign after redesign, and I’ve started the back-end from scratch no less than 5 times.

The most interesting thing about all this is that almost five years later the project is still just as necessary as it was when first conceived. In the last five years the local alternatives in our launch areas (the Olympic Peninsula and Snoqualmie Valley, both in Washington) have not improved at all. This is why the project can’t die, and it’s why I’ve been tucking in extra hours where possible to give the push the final site needs to go live.

To ensure a quicker launch, things will be coming online in stages. Stage one will include local business and organization listings, events/activities tracking, and possibly local news. I’m not talking months to launch, or even weeks — much less. I can’t name an exact day other than “when it’s done”, but I can assure you that things are very close.

In the mean time, check out the shiny new splash page »