Mid January Website Progress Report

The last few weeks, we’ve been testing every component of the website in every browser, operating system, and device combination we can come up with. Every time we find an issue (like, in Firefox only, a certain menu doesn’t correctly cover another menu), we file a ticket with iFactory, and they get to work fixing it.

We’ve also been working on our content. This helps testing, since we’re doing real world tasks with the website as we test. But working on content has made me realize there’s a lot more to do than I thought.

For instance, when we build the website back in 2011-2012, our primary focus was on an initial cleanup, and many of our pages were imported from the original website without substantial changes.  Often, that means they were built under the mistaken assumption that no one would scroll beneath the fold.  At the time, we thought most big monitors people had would be 1440 x 900 pixels. The monitor I’m writing this on today has a viewport almost three times that size, and 11 times as many pixels. Many of our pages from our current site simply look empty on the new site.  Some are so short that their content isn’t provided in a context that matters – if you landed on that page from a search, you might not know how what you’re looking at relates to anything else. Reworking all of those by, for instance, moving a page with a standalone Flickr slideshow into a slideshow widget on a page that tells you about what you’re seeing, takes some time.

Since, despite the cleanup efforts we’ve made in the last several years, there are still more than a thousand pages on the website right now, it’s going to take us some time to go through those. There’s almost 400 open tasks on our list of things to do before we launch, and those are just the tasks I’ve built – that number should be a lot higher. Consequently, there’s no launch date to announce yet. Hopefully I’ll have more to report next status post.