Our New Website: Lessons Learned

We have finally put up the new habaneros.com website! The site is by no means 100% done, but it has hit that point where it is a large enough improvement over the old site that we have put it online, even though there are a few rough edges. This was a bit of an interesting experience because we decided not to use a CMS solution to create the site, which gave our User Experience team a little more freedom during the design stage. Although wonderful at the beginning, you quickly start to see the benefits of CMS (or even a home-grown XML / XSL solution) when you actually start production on a site!

Some things that are at the top of the list for v1.1:

• We dropped support for a few browsers in order to speed up development and produce almost-table-less XHTML throughout the site. The new website will not support you if you are using a version of IE that is less then 5.5 (includes all Mac versions of IE), or if you are using a version of Netscape that is less then 7. Currently if you visit the site with either it just looks like a big mess. We have purchased BrowserHawk and will be redirecting people with unsupported browsers to a friendly page that is similar in content to the ESPN.com Browser Upgrade Page.
• The navigation gets a little cluttered on the left hand side when you get deep into the various services - for example on the SharePoint page it is really easy to miss the navigation that includes SharePoint Quick Start and our SharePoint Experience. I think we are going to try something a little different here, and streamline the amount of navigation we present to the user at any one time.
• RSS! We want to get all of our events and news into an RSS feed so our visitors can subscribe and keep up to date with what's going on at Habañero without even visiting our site.
• We need to insert more imagery throughout the site that shows samples of the various user interfaces we have created for our clients.
• Develop the Clients and Case Studies section further to talk about the work we do with each client and show samples of the solutions we have developed.
• We need to have more information about our in-house HCI (Human Computer Interaction) Lab and describe in greater detail how we develop usability test programs; conduct usability tests; and illustrate the different types of reporting options that are available to our clients.

Some additional things discovered when creating the site ...

1. Don't Create vCards in the Mac OS X Address Book
   For some reason Outlook 2003 on our PCs didn't seem to open any of the vCards I exported from the Mac OS X Address Book. In order to allow Outlook to read the cards I had to import them into Entourage, save them and email them to myself, and then import them into Outlook. After they were in Outlook I cleaned them up, emailed them to myself and then saved them to our server.
   
   Now that I am using the cards Outlook 2003 exported all of the programs can open and read them fine. From now on I will just save myself some work and create them in Outlook. I'm stoked about having vCards for all of our employees online. Hopefully putting them in a JS popup window and having JavaScript create the code to the links will keep out those nasty email address harvesters.
2. Don't let Visual Studio .NET 2003 near your nice XHTML code
   I was shocked at how Visual Studio .NET 2003 massacred my pristine XHTML pages. Once everything was done we had to go back and clean up the pages. Can't wait for VS .NET 2005 (Whidbey)!
3. Content always sucks to create
   Content is probably the biggest risk item in any website development project. People always tend to underestimate how much content they need to write and how long it will take them. For most projects we bring in a writer to help our clients (if they don't have one in-house). We brought in an external writer for our own site and she did a great job. The content on this site is waaaayyy better then our old site – it actually gives people an idea of what we do.