The idea for placepad grew from a frustration with the quality of online real estate listings. Even the listings with very high quality photos rarely give you any indications what area of the house the photos are showing you and where they are in relation to each other. Some very high end home listing occasionally have floor plans that add immensely to the quality of the online experience of viewing the photos and listing info. That is definitely a rare feature though. Our suspicion was that only the high end listings had floor plans because they are simply too difficult for the average person to put together and get on to the web and too expensive to have someone build for you. As placepad was built out for beta it became clear that there was no reason to limit the floor plans to real estate listings and we've tried to make the floor plan useful for whatever scenario someone can come up with.

So, the core idea behind placepad was to create a super easy way for anyone to create a floor plan very quickly. We hope we've accomplished that and in the areas where we are currently falling short of that goal we plan to quickly improve based on feedback.

The placepad team is currently not so much a "we" as it is a "me". I'm Josh Wagoner. The placepad feature design and development has all been done by me, in my free time over the last couple years. I was super fortunate to find an amazing designer via 99designs.com named Brian Tom who did an awesome job on the logo and visual design of the site. You can learn more about Brian and his work at hoshimo.com. I'd definitely recommend him for any web design work.

The placepad site is built using Django and PostgreSQL on the server. The floor plan viewing experience uses HTML and CSS with jQuery. The floor plan authoring experience is built with Microsoft Silverlight.