A lot of hard work has finally paid off
When 2009 started most people were working on setting those all important personal goals for the year. Let's face it, for most of us If your still following 1 a congratulations is in order. Here at STERIS we were starting the planning phase of what would become the new www.steris.com. If you don't know I was lucky enough to have joined this team back in October of 2008. I happy to announce that over the weekend we were able to launch the new corporate site. There is still plenty of work to do but I would like to walk you through a quick overview of the new compared to the old and give a quick run down of the new features. In the future I will post some more code specific features.
Here are a couple screen shots from the old site with it's counter part from the new site. The first is the home page and the second is the news page which is also an example of an inside page with sub navigation.
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If you check out the new site http://www.steris.com there is an obvious upgrade from an overall look and feel. The new site feels cleaner and just a little more pleasing to the eye in my opinion. I was also able to find pages in the site that were taking in excess of 12 seconds to load. This was mainly due to poor database queries that I was able to rewrite and turn into page loads of milliseconds. This site really takes advantage of the 3 components that drove the development of the site.
- Adobe ColdFusion - This was just a given if you know me. We are still running on 7 here but we plan on upgrading some time in the future I just think given the fact that 9 is planned for release this year we may hold out for that.
- jQuery - This was a combined efforts of the jQuery platform. When I say that I mean the core had a huge role in the architecture but we definitely took advantage of the jQuery UI project and many other great plug-ins out there.
- blueprint CSS - For those of you not familiar with CSS frameworks I am here to tell you that they are a pleasure to work with. There are couple out there that I would recommend but blueprint really came through for us. It's so nice to work on a site without using tables for layout, but it's also nice knowing you don't have to be a CSS genius to make it cross browser compatible.
This was my first huge corporate site and there and anyone working for large corporations out there know what its like. There are many approvals and sign offs that have to happen but lucky for me I was just a part of an important team. Our team worked great together and in the end we seem to be getting some positive feedback and that's all you can hope for. If people are happy with your work and you are satisfied with the completed project you can chalk it up as successful project!
Thank you to all of you who have sent positive feedback.
