A pair of Ontario-based university students have launched The Development, an interesting new website that, simply put, is dedicated to featuring all of your personal websites.
Personal websites aren’t raved about too much but maybe they should be; think about all the developer and designer talent who spend the majority of their energy building an online platform. But their personal blogs or websites often are likely just as beautiful, if not more. Even professionals who hold large social followings have been able to transform their personal websites to de facto news blogs or high-traffic destinations for professional advice.
Cofounders Jeff Martin and Victor Mak, students at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo respectively, have created The Development to feature interview-style insight into various people’s (mostly startup employees) websites.
“We plan to launch new interviews every Monday and Wednesday, and yesterday our views spiked without interviews,” said the 22-year-old Martin. “We’re seeing a slow growth in readership but we in the future we want this to be something that people look at for inspiration for greatly designed personal websites and even websites in general.”
The Development is a simple blog dedicated to sharing stories about people and their websites, inspired by The Setup, a San Francisco-based site that asks professionals, simply, what they use when they get stuff done. For Martin, “it all started with my curiosity about other people’s websites. I spent a lot of time exploring other personal websites, trying to see the mindset of the creators of the websites. Victor and I built this over the week and contacted more than a dozen other people to feature how they built their website, the thoughts behind the design of their website, the framework, the software they used and everything in between.”
For now its more of a hobby project for Martin and Mak, who also works as an intern at a startup housed in Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone (DMZ). Martin said part of the motivation was to build a pleasant user experience with out interruptions from ad banners.
The Development seems to be yet another example of how university students in the “Toronto-Waterloo corridor” are scrapping together simple, interesting websites. These students aren’t as concerned with monetization, but merely building things that they think would be cool. And who knows- with enough traffic maybe The Development will be generating revenue some time soon.