by Rod Armstrong, March 9th, 2006 | 1 Comment
In the not-too-distant past, one of our favorite things to do here at Site5 was a total redesign of our website.
The current website layout/design before you today is in it’s 9th or 10th generation, depending on how you count it.
Being it in our natures the need to rewrite, rebuild, remake, improve, and to generally wish to make any creation better, we were continually upgrading (or “changing,” or “making worse”) the look/feel/layout/navigation of the site.
The days of the Total Redesign, however, may be behind us. As part of the New Media Web 2.0 Zeitgeist, the practice of redesigning has been generally replaced by the idea of
realigning.
Instead of completely tossing all the elements of your current site away and starting from scratch, it’s more a process of figuring out what works vs. what doesn’t, and fixing and building upon the elements you have.
Today’s new homepage launch is a mark of such realignment. Instead of scrapping the homepage design entirely, working up a complete new graphical mockup, or embarking on a new site altogether (don’t laugh, it has happened), I decided to start with a first step: cleaning up some of the current page code, moving some elements around, changing some colors that didn’t work, etc., and releasing the results. There is still much more to improve, but at least we are now one step closer.
I hope the new homepage is a little more useful and easier on the eyes. Expect further “alignments” (I guess that would be the right word for it) very soon.
by Kevin Hazard, March 7th, 2006 | 2 Comments
Rational thought would suggest that price and quality have a direct relationship: as one goes up, the other one is implicitly expected to rise as well. This case is not exclusive to the web hosting industry… it is universal: You want a brand new, fully-loaded 2006 Lexus LS430? You can get one “out the door” for just under $70,000 from your local Lexus dealer. You want a not-so-new 1973 Ford Pinto? Head to ebay, and you can grab one for just under $700. “You get what you pay for,” right?
Why Give More for Less?
Site5 is price-competitive. The web hosting industry thrives on this kind of competition (echoing back to the post about hosting becoming a commodity), and there is a blaring dichotomy of inexpensive, lower-quality hosts and more-expensive, “high-quality” hosts. It would be pretentious for me to say Site5 is an affordable, high-quality host because I am pretty biased, but our rationale behind lowering prices to their current level is more or less to give customers an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an exciting revolution in web hosting (not because we are tired of providing good support).
If you spend much time traversing the waters of the web hosting industry, you have probably seen the declaration, “There is no perfect host… You should look for the host that is perfect for you” about a million times. Don’t scoff and close the window yet; this post is not intended to be a marketing pitch for Site5 as the only perfect host on the planet… It is merely intended to acknowledge the common (what we would believe to be a) misconception that the customer experience is limited by that customer’s budget.
The last thing we want to be is a “cheap web host.” We put so much work into development, support, and planning that we could not live with the idea that our affordability is implicitly damaging our quality. We continue to strive to improve and get feedback from all of our interactions with customers and competitors (through forums, emails, blogs, and even comments on our illustrious weblog), and we try to learn from or act on all of the suggestions and criticisms.
Our business model is to continue to provide affordable hosting with innovative, useful features while providing a stellar customer experience. We always welcome suggestions, comments, criticisms, and free Lexus LS430’s, so if you have any of those for us (especially the cars), please send us an email: management|at|site5(dot)com.
by Kevin Hazard, March 2nd, 2006 | 1 Comment
NOC NOC ** Who’s There? ** Hide-out ** Hide-out who? ** Hide-out you can guess what we did last weekend…
Last weekend, we had a walkthrough spot-check of two of our Network Operations Centers, and we are very pleased with what we saw. After the card-swiping in and out and facial scans/ thumb print verifications, we got up-close and personal with a few servers… including the high-flying destruction of one of our older servers (read: Thrown off of the roof of the NOC). We got the toss on video, so you might be seeing it on an update to this post at some point.