Hello customers and visitors,
If you’ve been to our site before today you’ve probably found it to be, well … janky. It ran slow, lacked useful features, and sometimes outright broke. Overall, it wasn’t a great experience to shop on.
As the technical manager of a company named after its domain name this has been a source of great personal embarrassment for me. We’re a small business that hovers around 20-25 people. As such, we all have to wear several hats and unfortunately for the last few years our website fell by the wayside of my other priorities. The fact is, despite having a web-oriented business name, most of our business is done in a very traditional way – by building personal relationships why our customers.
That’s all changing now.
Well, except for that last part – we’re more devoted than ever to building a relationship with you. It’s just that now the website won’t get in the way of that.
Over the past few weeks I’ve hunkered down with my team and completed the first phase of a full website overhaul. During this phase we rebuilt the underlying site from scratch to fix some longstanding technical and performance issues. Until today our site was actually about 12 years old, and has undergone probably half a dozen major overhauls in that time. All of those were built on top of the same base, resulting in a Frankenstein’s Monster sort of situation.
Think of it as if our website were a house. Over the last decade, we’ve had a bunch of contractors come through to do everything from change the wallpaper to install whole new rooms. Each contractor has their own way of doing things. That’s fine in the short-term, but after such a long span of time it became untenable. The house that is our website suddenly had doors nailed on in weird places, dangerous wiring, and random holes in the floor.
That’s what we’ve fixed in this first phase. The website itself looks very similar to the old one (with a few specific improvements), but you can expect it to run a lot faster and with far fewer issues. Back to our house analogy, we did a full tear-down and rebuilt right down to the foundation. All we moved over from the old one was the furniture.
Over the coming weeks and months you can expect to see many incremental improvements in the site from here, primarily oriented toward giving you a much better experience as a user. We want to make it much easier for you to find the products or information you’re looking for. If you’re a regular visitor to this site we’d love your feedback. Feel free to contact us with your thoughts.