Note: this is one of a series of posts about the creation of the King Design web site.
When I decided to create a full web site for my business, I had three main goals in mind:
- A home for my commercial products and development services.
- A central resource for my customers.
- A back-end framework that would make site maintenence easy, meet functional needs and be flexible for future expansion.
I wanted a site more focused on showcasing my products and services, but I didn’t want to turn my personal site into a commercial site. It made sense to go ahead and create a full business site. I e-mailed a few people that I knew had both personal and professional sites, and they all had good things to say about having two sites.
I wanted a clean, professional look for the site with simplicity that would make navigation easy. I think I’ve accomplished this, though there are still some design elements that I think can be improved. Like every site I’ve built in the last two years, the markup is semantically accurate and XHTML 1.1 compliant.
I still don’t have a great solution for having Tasks Pro™ on a separate web site. I suppose I could bring all that content over to kingdesign.net/tasks-pro and point taskspro.com to that address, but it’s nice an simple to have people be able to go to taskspro.com.
It is hard for a developer to write quality marketing/web page content about their own products. We have a tendancy to get too detail oriented when we need to stay at a much more “macro” level. Because of this, I called on a friend for some outside help with the content and she did a great job. She was able to keep the content accessible to a less technical audience; something I struggle with. Thanks Amanda.
To create better customer resources, I added searchable FAQs (still working on making the documentation searchable) and created a centralized download area (language files, etc.). I also moved the forums for Tasks Pro™, Tasks and Tasks Jr. to the King Design web site.
I chose to use WordPress to maintain the site content because I think WP excells at making it easy to add and update content. I also have my own home-grown customer management system and little automation systems for trials, demos, etc. I also set up RSS feeds for myself to keep an eye on trial sign-ups and downloads. So far, everything has been working out quite well.
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Migrating from taskspro.com | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[…] Tasks™ (versions 1.5 and 2.5 respectively), I decided to re-launch the King Design web site as my business storefront. In doing so, I moved the Tasks™ home to kingdesign.net. However, I already had a full site […]
April 18th, 2007 at 12:14 pm