Inet-Toolbox Web Site Rebuilding Project 2003

Our new Web site was developed during 2002 and 2003.  For those of you who are considering a rebuild of your own, here is a general overview of the process we went through during our own project.

Evaluate Current Site

We did an evaluation of the current web site during the fall of 2002 and got feedback from our visitors on what they liked and didn't like, what worked and didn't work.  We did a statistical analysis of our visitor logs for over a year to see where they went and what they looked at on our site to assess what was valuable, what was unnecessary, and what needed more visibility. Our statistics also revealed that we still had approximately 40% of our site visitors using Netscape 4.x which meant we would have some extra work to ensure the new site was compatible with that browser version.

Mockups

We designed mockups of our new look and sent them out to a test group in our audience for feedback and suggestions.  What we found is that the two we liked the best were also the two our audience liked almost equally.  As a result, we have incorporated both designs in our site!

Feedback

Feedback from our test group helped us plan and modify our work as we went along.  Their suggestions helped us evaluate everything from content to the use of multimedia.  The decision to keep the site clean and simple but include more imagery and additional dynamic capabilities was applauded by the group.

Standards

Inet-Toolbox has always been big on following standards as much as possible, and our new site revision continued to support web standards.  Our goal was to create the new site as compliant XHTML and liberal use of Cascading Style Sheets.  The only time we moved beyond those specifications is in sections of the site that require special features we are using from FrontPage, such as forms and forums.

Our new site is the result of using Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Photoshop, Flash, JavaScript, ASP pages, and of course, good old fashioned hand coding :)  The goal is fast, clean, and sensible along with interest and practicality for our clients.

Content Evaluation

We had to consider every page of the current site and evaluate whether to keep it or get rid of it.  Pages that were regularly accessed or that contained valuable reference material were all kept.  Hyperlinks were updated throughout the entire Toolbox Resource Kit along with new additions to the content. 

Navigational Evaluation

Our site had grown considerably since its first launch and while the navigation was great in the early days, we found that some content was simply getting missed as the site got larger.  The categories that made sense to us as designers and developers were not always that obvious to our audience, so we decided to bring more of the content up front.  Although our content categories have remained primarily the same, we have made it much easier to spot the content without knowing the categories they belong to.   The new home page now has links directly into popular content without needing to drill down into the categories.

There are also navigational aids along the bottom edge of the top banner that display where you are located in the site, and the bottom of most pages contains not only a global navigation menu but also a section menu.

Imagery

One of the comments we received repeatedly was that we should have pictures of our training center up on the site.  Our graphic designer worked with a number of images we provided and then we chose a few specific shots.  Now that we have moved, we will continue adding images to our site as we get more from our new location.

Dynamic Capabilities

Every page now has a search feature on it for the site.  This is the result of recent research showing that visitors would rather search for keywords than drill down into content on a web site.  Besides that, it only makes sense! This search engine proved to be the biggest challenge in the project, not only because of the demands made on the programmer to get what we wanted (and it's still being tweaked), but also because each time we included it on a page it played havoc with our stylesheet formats in Netscape!

Since we are trying to keep our pages very short, we decided to add a news ticker to the home page for our own news items instead of providing a chronilogical list on the page as we have been doing in the past.  This allows us to get all the news bites in without using up too much space on the page.  It also provides a nice visual effect to the news. 

Our hardware distributor has provided us with a dynamic "system builder" online.  This allows those hoping to purchase a computer system to customize it to suit their needs online and get the retail price, then contact us for our selling price.  The system builder is designed so that hardware components (such as sound cards, motherboards, etc.) that are incompatible can't be put into one system; you'll always create a working system using the System Builder.

To help our clients, we added Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sections to the site.  This will help address many of the most common questions asked by our clients about everything from buying computers to paying for their workshops.

What's Next?

We will be doing test group evaluation randomly over the next few months to check that we are on the right track.  This group will do some design and usability studies on the new site as well as provide general feedback on what they want to see. If you would like to participate in any of these studies, please don't hesitate to let us know. We always ask for feedback from you, our audience, to help us improve the site.  This adds the "wildcard" since we really won't know what might come out of the woodwork on this one! A better site, means better service, and that's what Inet-Toolbox is all about.  Great service that helps you manage your technology challenges better, day in and day out