Well we just had our bit April Fools Day prank.  You can find the mission at http://www.dailymission.com/mission/24b53/Never-Gonna/  The rundown is this: we created a mission offering up a $50,000 award and then took away the ability to compete.  Ok, so not the most inventive thing ever, but give us a break!  It was our first attempt and we didn't have time to do any elaborate coding like other sites.  I can safely say that we got at least a handful of people with it.  I got a few frantic emails and IMs along the lines of, "OMG I CAN'T PARTICIPATE FIX IT QUICK CUZ I HAVE A GOOD ONE I WILL WIN!"

So that's April Fools.  The big news is that we're working on a new layout.  We've finally found a graphic designer that "gets us."  He understand what DM is going to be and he is leading the way in the design.  It's great to work with a professional that doesn't need his hand held and to be told what to do every step of the way.

The redesign should launch sometime in the middle of April. Phil is heading upmost of the redesign.  Since my wife had a baby 2 weeks ago it's been not-so-easy to get the time I need.  Plus, this is one of those deals where too many cooks in the kitchen would mean disaster.  At least that's what I tell myself so to not feel bad about not helping Phil with the coding in this round!

Look for the new version soon.  I'll blog about it to let you know when it's done.

Cheers

 -eli

I've been bad at blogging lately.  I haven't had much time!  But I guess that's a good thing.  We've been busy.

A little late to make this post, see our full blog entry about daily mission beta 3's launch.

http://dailymission.vox.com/library/post/daily-mission-beta-3-released.html

For more months than I care to mention, we've been doing phased development of the Orbit/FR website.  Orbit/FR wanted a tailor-made Content Management System (CMS) that met their specific needs and requirements.  Some of these requirements came from issues from the previous website: all data was kept in a single, flat, database table with no backups and no front-end management tool, so only their web admin could fix anything; there were no formal or standard templates, so even when things looked similar they had slight differences which gave the company a bad image; and the markup of the old site was terribly malformed; everything hinged off of one page -- index.asp -- that served up pages by a PageID through the querystring, so things weren't very optimized for search engines.  Other requirements came from meetings prior to launch: the need for a backend administration system to manage all aspects of the site, from meta data to images to sales representatives to contact information.

In the end, we did everything we could on our end to keep costs down for Orbit.  We made sure to plan each section and feature out ahead of time to make sure that we didn't have to go back and recode anything.  We also made sure that we took advantage of third-party tools and new .NET features wherever we could -- specifically, LINQ, Telerik RAD Controls, jQuery, Master Pages to drive the three or four distinct templates in the site, SiteMapDataProvider to manage breadcrumbs, sitemaps and navigation, and google custom search API to use google's search engine power for a seemlessly integrated site search.  Mix all of those in with some good coding practices and polymorphism, and some solid custom-built User and Server Controls, and what we ended up with was a solid, structured, ASPX-based CMS that allowed even non-technical people to administer and update (and protect via VSS).

So what took so long for the new website?  The number of hours spent building the system weren't all that high -- probably only one to two months worth of hours if you stack them together.  The problem we had was getting content together.  The system was built, but no one had good content to put in it!  So after months of struggling to scrape content together to make it a full-featured launch, we finally got all the data imported into the system and pushed the site out the door last week.

Graphics were done in part by a third-party contractor and by Orbit/FR's new parent company, Satimo.  The new site features a new logo and color scheme which aligns with Satimo's corporate branding.

The site was done in semantic markup with tableless design and styled completely by CSS.  Some light javascript and jquery and it uses graceful degradation for users who do not have javascript enabled.

The website isn't 100% complete.  Just phase 1 has been completed.  Orbit has  plans for the site, but that probably won't come at least until 2009.  There are bigger things to take care of for now!

That's all for now.

Cheers
  -eli