Introducing CodyHouse 2.0
A look at the past and what to expect from CodyHouse in the future.
Today we launched a new version of CodyHouse! Although the design may look familiar, the engine that powers the website has been rebuilt from scratch. The whole library of resources is still there (and being updated), the courses section is no longer available, and there’s an entirely new section of web components that is not ready yet, but that gives you an idea of what to expect next.
This day marks the beginning of a new, exciting adventure for us.
In this article, I’ll take you for a quick journey, which starts from the beginning of CodyHouse and ends with our plans for its future. In the next article (coming soon), Claudia Romano will explain in more details the making of the new website.
How it all started
We never really talked about why we started CodyHouse. So here’s our (quick) story!
CodyHouse was born four years ago, as a side project created by Claudia and me. Exactly six months before the launch, we had almost zero experience in web developing. We both decided to quit our full-time jobs. Claudia was an R&D engineer at a tyre company, while I was collaborating as a designer with few companies back in the Photoshop-is-all-you-need days. We did a full immersion to learn the basics of web design because we saw potential in doing so.
The plan was: “we have enough funds to study and pay the rent for one year. We’ll spend the first six months studying, and the following six building a web design business”.
The first six months were the toughest: we were spending endless hours doing online tutorials (no school, we figured the most efficient way to grab as much knowledge as possible was to go through the infinite library of online courses and articles). Since we were not “so young,” there were moments when we felt like we were wasting precious time. In the end it paid off, and we learned a valuable lesson: it doesn’t matter how much time you spent getting your degree or creating your professional figure. If you feel overwhelmed by the idea of learning something new, you have to rewire your brain, so that learning new things becomes, if not easy, natural. It’s not only about improving; it’s surviving in an ever-changing environment.
If you feel overwhelmed by the idea of learning something new, you have to rewire your brain, so that learning new things becomes, if not easy, natural.
Anyway back to the story! Four months in, it was time to start thinking about how to create a business. The only realistic option was to develop websites for clients. But how to get clients? Enter CodyHouse! We thought: “How about we create a library of ready-to-use components for web designers? We can learn from it, and people will see that we can build stuff. If we get enough traffic, we can reach potential clients too.”
We created our first six components, and we launched CodyHouse. It was May 2014.
Since the very beginning, we were overwhelmed by the response to our little project. We decided to move forward and create more content. With each new resource, the number of website views increased, as well as our experience in dealing with every day developing problems (performance, browser compatibility, user experience…). Oh, and we got our first clients!
The library of resources kept growing. Some of them became quite popular.
To give you an idea of the number of downloads:
1) Vertical timeline -> 175000
2) Back to top -> 166000
3) Responsive tabbed navigation -> 106000
Thanks to CodyHouse growing popularity (about 3 millions page views each month), we had the chance to work on many client projects. And, most importantly, we had the opportunity to select the projects we wanted to be part of. In business terms: we could charge high hourly rates, so to have the possibility to work both on client projects and CodyHouse.
Our first product and why CodyHouse was no longer updated
One year after the launch of CodyHouse, we made a new plan: “We’ve made enough money to sustain ourselves for another year. We’ve helped many businesses building their products. What about we try to develop our product?”. And so we started working on Nucleo, our very own application.
However, building a product proved to be much more challenging compared to working with clients. A product (and the profit it generates) is built one small step at a time, while working with clients guarantees a steady income. Long story short: at the end of the year, we had Nucleo, a great product that still needed time to grow, but we needed another source of income. We were still working on CodyHouse half of the time, so we decided it was time for our beloved project to generate some revenue.
We launched two (premium) video courses. It wasn’t a fiasco, but we got the business model all wrong: we priced the courses too low, and we probably didn’t pick the right topics. A few months later, we had to get back to working with clients.
With Nucleo making significant progress, and the work as web design agency, the time available for CodyHouse was shrinking. This sounds like the part of the story where I tell you that we were working evenings and weekends to keep CodyHouse alive. The truth is we didn’t. We decided work was not the only priority.
So we made another plan: “If we keep pushing Nucleo, we can reach a point where we no longer need clients. That would give us the opportunity to relaunch CodyHouse big time!”.
We did it. The new CodyHouse is here. Now let me explain what to expect next!
CodyHouse 2.0
The mission of the new CodyHouse remains the same: to create excellent resources for designers and developers. What was before the only content, our HTML/CSS/JS resources (now called “experiments”), is still a (big) part of the new vision. We are in the process of updating all of our 91 resources, and this will take some time! Once the most popular components have been refactored, we’ll start planning new tutorials and experiments.
The courses section no longer exists, but we’re not ending our educational content: we will be posting tips and articles on our blog, so make sure to keep an eye on it! About the old courses: we’ll make them available for free on Youtube within the next few weeks.
Let’s talk about the new exciting section: web components.
We’ve been asked many times by our community to build a framework. All of our resources/experiments, although easy to integrate into existing projects, are “isolated components”. Hence the idea: “what if we create a new kind of framework, based on components. We could allow our users to add their own (real) content, and even customize the components before exporting them. Wouldn’t it be cool?”.
It’s challenging because, in addition to creating a library of linked components/units, we have to develop an additional layer, which is the interface to let the user customize such a component-based design system.
Customizable web components. This is the next phase. We’re working on it already, although there’s still a long way to go. But don’t worry: we’ll be sharing frequent updates and sneak peeks to keep you in the loop. Make sure to follow us on Twitter or Facebook!
What comes next is challenging and very exciting. And we can’t wait to make it happen.
