Managing a fairly large website can be frustrating at times, especially when the time comes to do a major redesign.

The Move from Static to Dynamic

At my day job, I have been through about three major redesigns of our website over six years and am currently working on our fourth. Throughout these various redesigns, our site began as a completely static HTML site and became more and more dynamic over the years. The nice thing about having a dynamic site is that I am no longer responsible for managing the site content; I am only responsible for the code and any bugs that pop up. The major drawback to having a dynamic site is that we’ve amassed a lot of data and it has gotten more and more difficult to redesign the site each time.

Our second redesign was our first primarily dynamic site and its foundation (the SQL back-end) was the basis for every redesign until now because of all the data. We have modified the database pretty heavily over the years, but its basic foundation is still there, mostly because it became too difficult to start over from scratch with the deadlines we had for each redesign. Hell, with the last one, I had two weeks to reprogram the entire front-end of the site by myself by the time the marketing department had finished the redesign plan and I barely got that done in time. There was barely any testing done but it turned out to not be as buggy as I thought it might be. It’s not how I like to do it, but I had no choice.

The New Redesign

As I mentioned before, I am currently working on another site redesign, but this time around it has been decided that the functional changes needed are too great to just modify the current database like we’ve done before. So now, we are starting over from scratch. It is just something that needs to be done, but it’s a huge undertaking. To be honest, it is a bit overwhelming.

With the previous redesigns, I was able to “freeze” the database and start the reprogramming. I just made a copy and the content managers had to keep track of any changes they made after it was frozen so they could make them again on the new version. This time around, however, it’s going to take too long to do the “freeze” option so my plan is to create the new database, get the admin screens working and then migrate the important information from the old database.

The Payoff

Even though it will be a difficult redesign, it will be worth it in the long run. I’ll admin, our current database is a mess with tables and stored procedures that are no longer being used, but the site is too large to keep up with what is and isn’t being used.

Starting over from scratch is going to make it much easier to manage the site and make it easier for future redesigns. It’s also gives me the opportunity to take what I’ve learned since the last redesign to improve and optimize the site.

Final Thoughts

Managing a fairly large site can be difficult and even frustrating at times, but it has given me experience I couldn’t have gotten working only on smaller sites.

May 18th, 2006

 

Tags: Design, Programming