Jun 05 2008
Neck Deep In A Website Re-Launch
So for the past couple weeks I’ve been rebuilding (from scratch) my marketing company’s website.
It’s coinciding nicely with a new office, a new marketing coordinator, a new services overview PDF, a very cool sales piece mailing, expanding our client services, and a few other big initiatives. I look at it as On Target Media Group v3.0.
My experience in designing websites goes back to 1994, when I started college and got my first UNIX account. Lynx was the text-based browser you could use via a terminal shell, and my life changed around October when Mosaic Netscape was released. It was lewd, crude and rude, but you could embed images and god-awful blinking text! Hand-editing HTML files was the only way (still the best) and my preferred editors were emacs, vi, and pico.
Things have come a long, long, long, long way since then – I am building our current site using a big mash up of Drupal 6.0, PHP scripting, MySQL databases, Flash audio/video components, Web 2.0 sharing technology, and many other neat little tools. For those of you still using traditional HTML-based sites, I really urge you to look into CMS – content management systems. This blog is run on Wordpress, one of the most common and useful CMS out there. They range from simple to insane, free to thousands of dollars, and it’s important you choose one that suits your needs, from the standpoints of a developer, a user, and an administrator. Some are overkill, some are limited. There’s also the arguments about procedural versus object-oriented – I have a solid background in programming both styles and understand the benefits and limitations of each.
So, in less than a week I’ll surely make an announcement (and send a big email to all my clients and web contacts). It’s exciting – I have added so many features that both clients and the media have requested, and the amount of time it took to develop it is a fraction of what a similar-level site would have taken in the past. Oh, and so far it has cost less than $100 – everything has been free except some Flash components that I found smarter buy than to try to re-create myself. Gotta love open-source development!
