EverhartSales.com
I usually don’t talk about my business projects on here, but rather my good or bad experiences while developing them. However, I’ve worked with EverhartSales.com for quite sometime, and in August 2004 I finally had the chance to release a new website for them.
This is the first Everhart’s design which is powered by CSS. Although past designs had included some rudementary CSS styling of fonts, CSS was never used for positioning. The markup for EverhartSales.com, like microsoft.com, is progressive. We made a huge leap forward with the August release, and will be making smaller steps in the near future to bring it to full validity. The current markup is much cleaner than in the past, and we are working each day to rid ourselves of archiec markup.
Why do it progressively?
Recoding the markup in 1 pass would be a huge undertaking. The design and markup as you see it now was an undertaking in itself, but having everything perfect “out-the-gate” would have taken far too long. We have other projects we’re working on right now, which hold slightly greater importance, so I decided to release what we had - which works fine - and revisit the markup later. The next time we work on the markup for this site, it will be substantially easier to make our changes - whether they are major or minor, which is a big relief. I actually look forward to working on the markup now, since it’s free of most clutter.
Interesting statistics
The current design, code named Project Billboard, has been public for about 1 month. After letting it run for a month, we noticed some nice statistical changes. Our payload for our site has dropped dramatically. For July 2004, a month when the websites markup was only slightly streamlined, we ended up eating about 30GB of bandwidth. This does not include FTP, or site administration - this number only represents public visitors to the site. In August 2004, a month almost completely run under the new design, we ate about 12GB of bandwidth. These numbers mean nothing until you look at the visitor statistics and page weight. Well, our number of visitors in August was 25% higher than that of July, and our page weight went down almost 50%. So you can say the redesign was a success from a statistical point of view.
The fact that our bandwidth usage has dropped will prove to be very valuable in the future, especially since our company’s business continues to grow. We no longer fear hitting any type of monthly cap, at least not in the near future. Before Project Billboard was released, our bandwidth was something we always kept in the back of our mind. We would constantly base our decisions for the site on our bandwidth stats saying: “Well, we shouldn’t use a larger image size because it might kill is in the long run.”. But that is what people want, big pictures of the products they want to buy at a good price. We’re working now on providing better content, more products and better pictures, something that we should have been working on all along, not worrying about having a Monthly Bandwidth Limit Reached error surfacing. Fortunately, it never came to that - and we are now confident that it shouldn’t.
This process was a definite learning curve for me. This was the first CSS based design for EverhartSales.com - and the first corporate design that I’ve completed utilizing CSS. So I got frustrated every now and then, but I was very fortunate in that I had practiced on TUG.n, and other smaller personal projects for awhile before hand. I now have 6 designs in the pipeline, all powered by CSS which were completed in a fraction of the time that I’d usually set aside for a design.
It’s been argued many times, by people more brilliant than me, that table based designs are easier and faster to develop. I tend to disagree. Once I completed a few site templates, namely a 2 column, 3 column, centered, liquid, fixed, etc. all which handled cross browser and platform issues, I was able to save these and use them for any future projects.
Conclusion
This design has helped out our business substantially. Our Google results are better, our markup is cleaner, our page-weight is smaller, and our hosting costs shouldn’t go up even with growth. We are now able to focus on our customer experience, and content - which are the two most important things for an eCommerce Web site. We’re looking forward to making even more improvements in the future, and having a banner year.
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