May 21, 2004
Soft launching. Silent running.
One of the previously hinted at projects that has been absorbing a fairly good chunk of my waking hours was launched two weekends ago. The Veer web site was re-released based on a new development platform, running on new servers, and getting consolidated under one roof at a new co-location facility. I can’t claim ownership or responsibility of much more than the preening and tweaking of the outward appearance of this launch. There are many, many other people who deserve those accolades. Suffice it to say that this was an immensely involved, complex and ultimately satisfying project that dozens of people are relieved to have finally pushed out the door. The primary reason it has taken so long for me to even mention the relaunch is of course, all of the post-launch tidying up and technical finessing that always follows events of this magnitude. Anyone who has worked on a large, multi-headed beast of a project knows how things break and crap happens. Regardless of how much stress testing and scenario playing you do, stuff doesn’t work the way you anticipated. Anyway, we’ve had our fill of niggly little checkboxes on our resepctive to do lists over the past couple of weeks that required a reasonable amount of attention.
Most of the improvements that were made to the site were to the architecture and database. You know, under the hood stuff. However, there are definitely a few showroom-fresh features spiffy enough for me to point out. Specifically, registered users can now save and edit separate billing, mailing and shipping addresses. That’s nice. You can also securely store information for multiple credit card accounts. And preferences. We’ve got the start of user-definable site preferences. More on those below.
Site preferences that can be specified include the number of thumbnails per page for search results and lightbox contents, default text for Flont™ type previews (a much requested feature, let me tell you…), the way that product keywords are displayed, and last of all, pop-up detail images of typefaces on search results and type collection pages.
This last feature makes browsing for typefaces that much easier by quickly providing a much more useful taste of each font prior to clicking through to a product page.
These are just some of the more visible highlights of what’s new on the product side of the site. Another related, but equally exciting (read: skunkworks) project was to convert our weblog, The Skinny, from what was basically a static Blogger-based include file into a standalone Movable Type site. Along the way, my partner Issa and I smacked together a new XHTML and CSS undercarriage that is standards-compliant, pretty much always valid, and tableless, without sacrificing any of the existing Veer clothing. And boy, are our arms tired.
I don’t know about the rest of my office compatriots, but I’d certainly appreciate hearing any feedback folks have on the Veer site, the new features, or the relaunched Skinny. Fortunately, we have the ability to handle comments now too.
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