Well, the launch of Hurricane (v12 of our web-site) went well and has been well received so far. We’re all pretty pleased actually, the latest version had a hard birth as the target was to avoid any hacks and patches to make the site work and largely that is what we have managed to achieve. As a software house, it’s temptingly easy to start hacking away at features and modules to get them working but with that temptation resisted we’re able to support it more cheaply and without worrying about breaking the systems behind it.
We’re using a standard template build now for another of our product sites (myBookingWizard.com) and the savings made in both development overhead and deployment time has been substantial.
For the technically minded we used Worpress 3.1 as the base platform using the Freshstart 1.0 theme, Akismet for spam control, Arne Brachhold‘s under-rated XML sitemp builder, Crowdfavourite for Twitter tools and the brilliant Zemanta plugin for automated research and link management. Copy and content across 300+ pages was ported over to the new platform in less than a week, the biggest content job was re-purposing many of the images (thanks Sam).
As ever, comments are gratefully received.
