How to eat your own dog food

The other day I came across “Eating Your Own Dog Food” at Wisdump and I figured I should share how I have been doing this on my own sites.

In case you didn’t know, “eating your own dog food” refers to using your own product. The idea is that if you are willing to eat your own dog food, it must be good; otherwise you shouldn’t sell it to others.

One of the ways that I practice this on my own website is by using it whenever I reply to comments. I never reply to comments with the WordPress admin system. I always go directly to the entry from my e-mail notification and reply right on my website. Therefore, I have designed the comments template in such a way that it is most comfortable for me, and in that I can assume to a degree that it will be comfortable for other people. I have also made comments via different operating systems and browsers, and one of the biggest eye-openers was making comments with Firefox on a Linux network. It was there that I realized that the Live Preview feature can be very slow, and thus I will be implementing a better feature soon.

Another way I practice this is by using the search feature from the front end every time I need to look for an article. I use the search form often, and that is why I keep it in a place where it is easy to find. I also designed the search results page so that it would be easy to use and provide the most results possible on a single page, while still being easy to skim.

I also proofread all of my entries on the front end after I post them. In this way, I am always one of the first people to read an entry, and I know that if it is difficult to read for me, it will be difficult for others. I am also a subscriber to my own feed via Google reader as well as via Feedburner e-mail updates. By doing this, I always know when there is a problem with my feed.

“Eating my own dog food” has done a lot for this website, but it has been even more effective for Liquid Designs. If you have been following that website for more than a year, you may remember that the information architecture of that website used to be much less effective than it is now. It was actually an entry over at GANB that inspired me to completely change the front end of that site. It really paid off too, because when I had to put together the list of nominees for the first round of the Hall of Fame, it ended up being that the easiest way to look at all of the entries was simply to look at the gallery pages on the site and visit each of the entries from there. Recently, when I had to choose the second group of nominees, it was once again easiest to find them with the gallery pages. It was also easiest to count the entries simply by looking at the totals that I had posted on each gallery page, and it was only because of this that I realized that I was one short of 200 entries.

Liquid Designs is probably the single project that I am most proud of. Every time I have had an interview where I have discussed my skills in web design and programming, I have always referred to that site, because from the very beginning, I have been responsible for every step of that site’s development. But, to be honest, that site would not be nearly as good as it is now if I was not a user of it myself. By “eating my own dog food” I have given myself an ongoing user test without any of the embarrassment.

Sometimes I think you can tell if a designer is not “eating his own dog food.” If you have ever made a comment on a blog and found the comment form extremely difficult to use, there is a chance that the blog author has never had to make a comment himself. I think this is most obvious on complicated blogs such as the ones over at ZDNet, where making a comment isn’t quite as simple as what you would expect from a WordPress blog. Some websites even make you wonder if the site creator ever views the site themselves. Websites that take a long time to load even on broadband, and especially on WiFi, are perfect examples of this, because if their creators ever tried accessing them often, they would be annoyed too.

But where I especially see this is with Flash websites. I have seen some Flash websites that have a “blog” implemented in Flash. The text tends to be very small and the entries are extremely difficult to navigate; these are the kinds of blogs that make you leave fast. When I see these blogs, I can only assume that the site creator has never tried reading it themselves; anyone who tries reading these things can see that blogs are not meant to be done in tiny Flash interfaces.

Why does all of this matter? Well, if you want people to visit (and more importantly, use) your website, then you should be comfortable using it too. I can’t imagine that this does not apply to anyone out there; everyone wants people to use their website; “eating your own dog food” is a way to make sure that it will be rewarding for others.

Update 11-26: Please excuse all of the typos I had when I first posted this entry. I need to train my speech-to-text software more…