We Have a New Site Design

Time to stir up the water and get a new blog design. Our previous design was very minimalist. We've decided too minimalist. We want you to be able to see the range of topics we care about, the various projects we are managing, and have room for things like Twitter and Comments too! Please tell us what you think. We splurged and bought this theme from a top Wordpress designer, Brian Gardner. (Internet oddball perhaps, but I like paying for quality services.)

One of the coolest things about blog software is how the design elements and the content are separated, kind of like how editorial and advertising once used to be. In theory, it's possible to swap out a new "theme" on the Wordpress blog, and the database of posts and comments simply gets wrapped in a new look.

In reality of course, it's not that easy because inevitably we want to tweak a little here, change a color there, add a widget, hide a widget, and make all new graphics too! It's so emblematic of the state of the web these days. On the one hand the glass is half-full: so many things are free and creativity abounds. OTOH, the glass is half-empty: it takes hours and hours to find stuff and make it work the way we want it to, a full spectrum of brain matter is useful when managing the wide and deep terrain that covers coding, design, and ultimately writing a coherent message!

I interviewed a marketing exec from IBM back in 2002. He said they had already survived 11 iterations of their web site over the past 6-7 years! Meanwhile, many small businesses are content to have one iteration every 10 or 11 years! (OK - so maybe I exagerrate a little.) Here's a list of things to think about to see if it is time to redo your website.

We want some of our clients to update their sites; "unfortunately," we built them with the most modern tools available at the time, so the sites are surviving, if not thriving. If it's not broken, don't fix it makes sense. But then there is the question: what opportunities are being missed that can only be gained with new technology?

One last thought. I used "we" a lot in this post. Really, it is Shane who gets the big kudos as he researched the WP themes, did all the extra programming, and even added some upgrades to the templates that he is sending back to Brian, the original developer. Mahalo nui Shane. You are no ka oi!

Twitter Joins Us on Verio

Let me start by saying, I'm dropping in on a conversation taking place at Techcrunch, Twitter and on the Joyent blog regarding the continue server outages at Twitter. I use Twitter but have been too busy this past week to even notice their recent round of outages. I found out today they had been hosting with Joyent and last night made the switch to Verio.

We've been a Verio reseller for over 10 years and all our client websites, and our personal sites, are hosted at Verio. A few years back we put some personal sites on a couple servers at TextDrive and everything was fine for a while. Then TextDrive was acquired by Joyent and we started having more and more downtime. It wasn't too much of a problem as these were just personal blogs. But when Beach Walks started taking off, which we initially hosted at TextDrive, we could no longer accept the outages and moved everything off the Joyent servers and terminated all our accounts.

It's a PITA (pain in the ass) managing servers. I've been doing it for 12 years now. We started way back in 1996 hosting all our own servers in our little office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When the count of servers grew to 10, and I started sleeping in the office to make sure they stayed online, I knew it was time to look for a datacenter.

I did a lot of research over a three month period, looked at all the big datacenters, some of which are no longer around, and finally decided on Verio. Verio is more expensive and very stingy on hard drive space. But the support it top notch, their bandwidth reliable, and most important, in the past 12 years our sites have never been down for more than an hour in the worst cases. Usually if there is an outage the servers are back up before we even knew about the problem.

Obviously we don't require the resources that Twitter does. And there's a lot of technical discussions and general agreement that Ruby On Rails (RoR), on which Twitter is built, has a very difficult time scaling for applications the size of Twitter. I tend to agree and would love to see Twitter re-tooled on a more stable platform such as PHP. But application server preferences aside, the first thing any company should do is not skimp on their hosting provider. You definitely get what you pay for when it comes to hosting in my experience.

So, we wanted to take this opportunity to welcome Twitter to the Verio family. I'm still not convinced RoR is the platform on which to build a heavily trafficked service such as Twitter. But it is definitely going to help now that Twitter is housed in a world class data center such as Verio.