1,000 Design Tools and Introducing Prototypr 3

We hit 1,000 design tools on Prototypr, but there's much more!

I began Prototypr around ~2016, and the website was cobbled together pretty quickly. I'd been manually adding tools, and then Sofia joined in early 2019 to help.

Introducing the Prototypr 3 Redesign

As the library grew, and the site popularity, there became a steady flow of people requesting to add resources, and sponsor the site - it became challenging to keep up! Our site also began outranking our medium publication on Google search, which I wrote about here

Sooo with all the demand, an upgrade was due....🥁🥁🥁 Introducing the Prototypr 3 beta! A brand new version of Prototypr - you can now:

• sign up and submit your own tools and resources
• bookmark tools
• have your own profile

The site has been completely recreated with Ann helping massively on the redesign. A preview is available on the subdomain 3.prototypr.io - and it's usable now!

I'm looking into how I can switch this to our main site without affecting the SEO.

Add features with demand

I think the learning here is that I never had a signup or submit form for years. So if you're building something early and think you need user registration and a bunch of other things, maybe you don't. Just add a typeform or something.

Balancing projects

This update was actually due probably last year, but throughout 2019, I was focusing more on creating my email design tool called Letter.

In all, I found it's only possible to run 1 large product at a time, to do it very well. If you're going to do multiple projects, my unsolicited advice is to keep one primary project, and have the other ones for fun. I have 2 big primary projects which can be a stretch. During this lockdown period, it's also challenging in different ways, so I'm very happy to have got things this far.

This is the first time sharing the new Prototypr, so if you get any issues, let me know! *(I know there is no SSL certificate on the beta)

Thanks for reading,