Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Astute visitors to 2wav.com might have noticed that we've updated our site quite a lot. We're sad to say that it's not as much of a change as it looks. What we've actually done is rolled back to our previous web site and updated its content.

Things Break

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the most recent Firefox release seems to have serious issues with the old site: we're talking flickering images, weird hover effects that don't stop when you mouse off, the works. The second is iOS 10, which has a tendency to fullscreen our application videos under circumstances we haven't quite figured out.

Honestly, this presented something of an emergency, as "buggy mess" isn't exactly the image we want to send visitors. As we saw it, we had two options:

1. Figure out what was causing the bugs.
   Pro: keep cool new web site. Con: said web site stays broken while we're up to our elbows in browser debug windows.
2. Just go back to something that we know works, with slight updates.
   Pro: we have a functional web site in short order. Con: our slick new site goes the way of the Dodo.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

There's a lot of temptation in the first option. We've done all this hard work to make our new site, how could we possibly throw that all away? If we just do more work to fix the bugs, then that work we already did won't be wasted.

Making decisions based on the amount of work already done, not its quality, or the perils in the future? This is textbook sunk-cost fallacy. The reality is we have no idea how much work it would take to fix the site for Firefox and iOS. We can hazard a guess, though, and it's "a lot." Once we got over the sunk costs, there really wasn't much of a choice:

Let it Go

As sad as it is for us to jettison the work we did, it's important that we a. have a functional site and b. have it soon. So, we rolled back to our previous site, but updated our portfolio section and switched from a Twitter feed to a feed from the blog.

We're already starting sketches for a new site that incorporates many of the cool things we made, but omits the stuff that spontaneously broke. We'll be excited to share that when it's done. As for our previous blog posts that reference features you can't see anymore, we'll be making sure that everything at least has gifs to show the effects.