Websavey has a new website! It's been many months in the making and has taken a great deal of time from many people [note: Greg Silver was the only person that developed this site.]. We chose ColdFusion 8 as our development language and have transitioned all the data from our old website over to a shiny, new extremely fast server [note: It's the same server and as of this writing, the data has not been transferred]. The road to this new site has been long and rocky at times. Read more to hear the story of what we did and how we did it.
In the beginning...
The Websavey website has been around in one incarnation or another since about 2001. In the early days, it was just couple of HTML pages on an old server in a closet behind a DSL line. As the project started to grow and more people got involved [*cough* lies *cough*], it was a drag to keep updating the HTML by hand so in 2001 we cast around and found some ideas of what we wanted to do with the domain. A full-on message-board unlike any other. While it never got to that point, it was home to many users before the MySpace and Facebook craze and these users spent hours upon hours checking in to see who posted what.
As the project grew, the website became more and more popular [not really]. Eventually we had to move it off the DSL line and onto a colocated server better suited to handle the site's resource requirements. As we made improvements we found that every time we reduced the latency on the website we received significantly more traffic, so optimizing the site became a major goal for us. By August of 2004 the site handled roughly 1M page views from 500K unique visitors. This is not an exceptionally large amount of traffic, but for a site where the majority of the traffic is interactive forums it meant that we had to continually tune the site to keep the latency down.
Moving Forward
General inertia kept us using the old code for several years during which time it had a harder and harder time coping with the load. We worked with optimizing code rather than rebuilding because of the customization we had done to each and every feature of the site. We routinely applied security patches and fixed little issues as they cropped up. Eventually we decided that with the next generation of Websavey we should put out a whole new website so we started looking around for alternative ideas.
The challenges
By far, the biggest challenge in porting was to move over all of our data [and still is]. Because the Websavey website contains a great deal of information in the forums and has been around for a long time, there are many internal pages and external sites that link deep into the site. We wanted to be sure that we not only preserved all that data but to save all the links also. It would have been very easy to sacrifice these internal and external links or even start with a blank slate, but it would have meant that we'd be severing ties with the history of the project. There are still useful links out in the wild that point to our old installation so we wanted to preserve our history in one place, so we aimed to keep as much as we could.This however is what should have happened rather that what did happen.
We hit some snags
There are no employees at Websavey that actually get paid to work. So our developers can only work on the project in the off-hours of the day, as they have real paying jobs.
So what happens is a version of the site is created, but within a week or a month, the steam runs out and the project is forgotten about. This is why we are going from version 1.0 to 4 or 5. I forget at this point how many different versions we created.
Making it look good!
This was the primary focus this time around. Using the new [old, but never implemented except on t-shirts] logo and a bit more up-to-date [Dare I say, Web 2.0] look.
Our journey is just starting. Now that we've got a shiny new website we're going to take good care of it so that it will last us for many years to come! We hope that you're as happy with it as we are!
