9 years, 4 websites later

Yesterday at work was a historic day. We launched our new website. Over a year in the making, it finally saw the light of day and graced the Internet with its presence. Our old website had been designed in late 1998 and we'd never done the big update. It was outdated, didn't reflect the company well, and was over 6 years old. That's 90 web years old, given most companies redesign their site on a yearly basis. Thanks to the magic of web.archive.org, you can still see the old one and even the one before that (the "rocket science clip-art" themed one).



The new one is cool, not just for the funky design but for a couple of things we're using. Plone, the open source cms tool, powers it, complete with some nifty performance enhancements to make it that much snappier. Darren oversaw that side of the operation along with Scott doing the bulk of the programming. The XHTML is all very standards based and CSS-ish. DIV tags everywhere, courtesy of Pinder. And we've even got our own RSS feed for those interested in subscribing to our news items. The pressure is on for us to write things both coherent and interesting about what we do now... Not like it wasn't before, but it was easy to neglect a bad looking / poorly functioning site. No longer. No more excuses.

Hooray for us. A new office and a new website in the less than 4 months. Very cool.