For those of you who know what I do for a day job, it will come as no surprise that my career choice tends to at times consume much of my time. Nor will it surprise you that when I get home the last thing I want to do is go on the computer. And so that partially begins to explain where I’ve been and why there hasn’t been too much going on at digitalflood.com for the last few weeks. A harsh winter and an old house that demands me paying attention to how much snow is outside to avoid minor things like– oh I don’t know having my propane regulator freeze so I loose hot water or having my water pump freeze so I lose all water tend to occupy your time.
With all that said, those of a keen eye may have noticed the Code Info page of our site keeps going up a tick or two everyday. Appearances can be deceiving and just because the main page isn’t changing it does not mean there is nothing “going” with the site. So this was the case with my latest endeavor that required much experimentation and playing with our underlying code.
This was all in an effect to make a quick recovery of my employer’s web site at http://www.warwick.net. The site is the web portal for my employer (WVT Communications) and homepage to many of our broadband Internet subscribers. Literally taking down that site is like turning off Google as far as our little web world goes in Warwick, NY. There was therefore a sense of urgency to restore the site when a slight mishap took down the existing (though arguably older) web engine.
It took me about 16 hours of straight time, but I managed to get the framework and branding done. There’s going to be a lot of grunt work needed by my associates at work to get the content filled in, but what you see before you is a CMS driven site that is Web 2.0 in look and feel. It has consistent branding and sensible layout. It loads in less than six seconds. It has a web search feature. Access to our various online portals (including web mail and bill pay) and content fed via RSS streams, as well as, mash up widgets. The result is a full featured basic launch point that is easy to navigate and yet feature filled. It loads well in any browser and depreciates when accessed by mobile device to speed up load times. Considering the time line (three days) and the budget (zero bucks) I am quite pleased with the accomplishment.
In so many ways this is a preview of what I had planned for df.com before I was drawn to put out this fire first, but in so many ways it also helped me understand some new directions I wish to go in that will lend itself to better structure here. So yes while there has been no news– there is good news nevertheless. Stay tuned.
