After a few months of programming day and night, my work project finally went live last Friday. I spent most of this week fixing bugs, but luckily, most of the bugs were fairly minor.

The Details

The idea behind this redesign was to start over from scratch and rebuild everything. Our old database that was originally setup about five years ago was getting to be pretty messy. It had been through two redesigns and with each set of improvements, it became more and more cluttered. With this redesign, I decided it was going to be better to start over from scratch and for us to convert and migrate as much data as possible.

So, for this redesign, I not only created a new database, but also built a complete administration site so others in the company could manage the content. After that was started, I build the entire front-end site. Needless to say, it was a huge undertaking. Of course, I didn’t build the entire thing by myself or anything, but I did the vast majority of it, database, back-end and front-end. The one part I didn’t create was the visual aspects. Marketing oversaw that part; I just put it over my code.

The Focus

The focus on this redesign was to make the site much easier for user to find what they are looking for. In the past, we always focused on our product lines, but realized that the average user has no idea what the differences are between the product lines. This time around, we focused on more generic terms like Home Audio that breaks down to Home Theater Systems, Speakers, etc. At the bottom level is where you finally see the product lines. We also used to have a focus on News-type items, but realized that over 80% of our traffic was directly to the product sections and most visitors didn’t care about the News items. So, we made products the main focus with News and other things as secondary options.

Another focus was to make the site more search-engine friendly. We used url-rewriting to make the urls easier to read for humans and to hopefully get the search engines to rank our pages a little higher. The urls match the page titles and the titles on the page which they supposedly like.

So, How Did It Turn Out?

Overall, I’m very happy with how the site turned out. It’s faster than I ever thought it would be. The code is clean and very easy to work with now. Plus, I learned so much planning and building this site. I’ll post some of the cooler things I learned soon. Now it’s time for me to take some time off because I am so burnt out right now.

Oh yeah, the url: Klipsch

September 8th, 2006

 

Tags: Design, Life, Programming