A new website is born

Earlier this year, I announced that I was redoing my company’s website because it was time. Well, much time has passed, and last week I finally ‘flipped the switch’. Yay!!!

Here’s a short chronology of the process, and my thoughts:

Select the ‘designer’ and technology:
I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have fellow blogger Mike Boyink do the site. It’s really just a coincidence that he is just one town away here in Michigan–I would have picked him regardless. Why? His approach to websites is very reasonable and aware of the technicalities. No grandiose strategies or pandering to my whims, just a very knowledgeable and capable individual.

Mike’s weakness, if you want to call it that, is that he just has one hammer in his toolbox, a blogging/CMS application called ExpressionEngine. He justifies is as just a very robust database creation tool, with the flexibility to do a lot of things, which it is. His expertise in applying EE is his strength, as he literally is the guy who wrote the book on using it.

Laying out the site:
While I knew what I wanted, I had some choices to make about content and categories. Categories drive navigation, and making the categories make sense to the visitor is important, but must also fit the product line. With that high-level thinking done, the rest of the site fell into place easily, relying on what already existed and worked on the current site.

Designing the site:
Mike, like myself, doesn’t profess to be a ‘designer’. But what he provided was certainly nice enough. The site was designed in Photoshop then sent out to be created using compliant CSS. We agreed to go with flexible-width website.

Building the site:
The database and the design template were done quickly, and that left me to just add content. Product specification data was entered by hand, which was much easier since I had someone else here do that part. But there was a ton more stuff to add.

Things slow down:
For most product lines, copy-and-pasting descriptions was not that simple. Carry-over code had extra tags and also didn’t always get rendered by ExpressionEngine the same. And, of-course, in-line links had to be corrected to new URLs. The database structure meant I had to fit the content to the template, a big change from my previous freedom to create a product page however I wanted.

I spent a lot of time working on the product line descriptions. It was time well spent, however.

Learning EE:
In the process of building out my content, I also started exploring ExpressionEngine on my own. I tweaked the page templates a number of times to better suit the way I was working the content, especially the way the product specifications lay out. I started to learn why Mike likes EE.

Fresh pictures:
Another slow-down was getting new pictures. A number of products had changed looks, so I had to format new pictures for the site. And some existing images weren’t the right size, or had other problems. Plus, I was adding photo-galleries for each product line, so there were additional images to prepare. I spent a long time working on images that I really hadn’t expected.

Finishing it off:
I allowed almost a month to review the product content over and over, as well as build-up the non-product content. I drove myself crazy with continual tweaking, but have no regrets. When I finally flipped-the-switch, it was almost anti-climactic. Its been live a week now. Google has already slurped-up the 301 page redirects in their site results, and none of my pages have lost any ranking.

The secret:
Okay, you guys know that I don’t directly mention my employer here, but if you wanted to see the site, and while you are at it, get Boyink’s side of things, you would want to visit this post here.

I’d have to say there is nothing spectacular in what we did or the resulting site—it is basic functional brochureware. But it is a lot of work to get everything right and am proud of the results. Thanks to Mike Boyink for all he did—I certainly recommend working with him if you need a site of a similar scope. Now I can start thinking about adding some important tools that can leverage the power of the database we’ve created.