Break out the Champagne!
For everybody else this is just another day on the Internet. For for me it’s the culmination of two months organization to get a new web site up and running. I have to say I am really pleased with the result. Obviously I am biased but I think it strikes a nice balance, combining a professional image with a little design flair.

Micro-Outsourcing
Two months might sound a long time to create a site that only has a dozen mostly static pages. But this is the inevitable result of micro-Outsourcing. My web designer lives in the USA and works on the project only in her spare time. So each iteration of feedback takes a couple of days to be processed if not longer. Then my flash designer lives in Italy and cannot work on the flash animation until the final design of the website is completed.

So the down side of micro-Outsourcing is the longer time frame that projects take, especially when the project involves many cycles of feedback. The up side is that it costs much less because you are only paying for the hours worked and not a fixed contract fee to a web design company. I once worked at a company that paid £60,000 (~$120,000 USD) for a couple of marketing consultants to create their site. Admittedly they wrote the copy as well as creating the actual site but even so, their site was only about the same size as this. Well, I only paid about 2% of that figure and I am happy to spend the time needed organizing the project when it results in a saving of 98%! That does not include the cost of the dedicated server that I am now using for the hosting.

Dedicated Server
Until today the web site was hosted on a shared hosting plan with one of the large American hosting companies. As a result you may have noticed that the old website was not exactly fast. You will also have noticed that whenever a new Krypton release occured the machine was bogged down serving out the installation file. Well no more, the new site is on a dedicated server and there should be enough bandwidth and performance to handle any likely load. This means I can go ahead with another feature I have wanted to add for quite some time, screencasts.

Screencasts
Currently there are only 3 screencasts on the website. I intend creating several more this week and hope to keep adding new ones over time. As a developer it is much much easier to learn how to do something from a screencasts than from documentation or from reading code. When you listen to someone walking you through the process it all makes sense in a way that a tutorial in the help never can. With the extra bandwidth on our dedicated server it is no longer a problem to host large screencast files.

If you have any particular requests for screencast topics then please let me know in the comments. I cannot promise to create them all but if there is enough demand for the same idea then it stands a good chance of making the list.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 3:30 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.