If you haven’t already noticed (and shame on you if you haven’t!), we have finally updated our homepage to a new and funkier style. Our original homepage design was a legacy of our ultra-bootstrapping days, when I had to ply my designer friends with wine and meals so they would create a homepage design for me on a nonexistent budget. And now that things are getting better, and I can afford to pay a designer, it was time to freshen up.

So please check it out and let us know your thoughts. Better yet – become a featured skimmer by telling us about the clever ways you use Skimbit.

One interesting piece of feedback I received from the ex-Dragon’s Den judge – Doug Richard – was that I should not market Skimbit as an all-purpose research and decision-making tool (because people don’t realise they need this), and instead market it as a solution to very specific problems, and to pick a few of them. For example, its a service for organising group holidays, planning weddings, and making important purchases. And then, he says, to make this the primary message of the homepage, and indeed the whole application.

Interestingly, quite a few other people have come back with similar feedback, so its definitely something I will factor into the next version of the homepage, and definitely something I will do with my forthcoming PR and advertising campaigns.

It is fascinating operating in this web environment having come from a software development background where development lifecycles were 6 months long, and if you changed your mind about a requirement, you had to wait 6 months to request it. These days, with web applications, it is not only easy, but necessary to make rapid iterative changes to design and functionality, to see what works best. It is indescribably difficult to take a step back sometimes from something I am so intimate with, and see what will work and what won’t, so chatting to new people who hear about Skimbit and visit the site is a highly educational and useful thing to do.

So I hope you like the new homepage, and find it communicates better what Skimbit is all about, especially to those not-so-technical people out there. Bit by bit we will work our way through the whole site, so it eventually will glow with brilliance (we hope!).

The last few weeks have been crazily hectic. Most start-ups have a management team, so the responsibility of finding funding can be allocated to one person, whilst the rest of the team continue to run the business. No such luck with me, unfortunately, I am a one-woman funding/project management/product management/strategic partnerships/operations manager entity. And its exhausting, but I’m pleased to report its going well.

There has been lots of interest, great feedback, and thankfully the business is running along steadily so I can dedicate a bit of time to the hunt for funding.

I’m pleased to report I have one large offer already, so hopefully the round can close soon, and I can get on with running my business. Then one hard part ends, and another hard part begins… hiring, expanding, designing, rolling out, selling… the real meat of it all. If anyone knows of a brilliant web applicationi product/project manager or a bright full-of-initiative operations manager who wants to work in an exciting start-up based in central London, please let me know!

What a whirlwind it all is though! I’ve met some extraordinary people, gotten incredible advice, and am full of ambition and plans. I’ve never been happier!

So, just need to push on and close this round, and hopefully 2008 will be the year of Skimbit!