Site5 Web Hosting Blog

Fixing Broken Windows

Posted by Matt Lightner, May 11th, 2006

For the past two weeks, Rod and I have been on a crusade to fix broken windows. No, we haven’t become glaziers. According to Rob May, a broken window is a metaphor for something about a business that’s in need of fixing. While these problems may seem trivial, they detract from a company’s overall image and can ultimately lead to larger and more serious problems down the road.

So what broken windows have we been fixing? Oh, anything and everything.

In particular, we’ve spent quite a bit of time tightening up the main Site5.com website. You may have noticed some of these changes:

• Our main index page has been redone and now has more information about our hosting, rather than the company in general. We tried to design a page that would quickly and easily inform visitors about our hosting and what makes it unique. We’d love to hear feedback on the new index!

• Our “about” section, formerly composed of six different sub-pages, has been condensed into a single brief page. Traffic analytics showed that less than 2% of visitors went to the “about” section. I guess fewer people than we thought are interested in hearing us self-glorify.

• The “contact us” page now has its own top level tab. I recently experienced some annoyance when trying to find an online merchant’s contact page, and I’d like to save Site5 customers (current and future) from the same hassle.

• Our neglected 404 error page is now up to date.

• The index pages for both our “web hosting” and “resellers” sections have been completely redesigned to better present what we feel to be the key points about our services.

• The “features” and “technology” pages, both of which were sub-pages of the “web hosting” category, have been merged into a single page. This page was re-styled to be easier on the eyes and content was removed in order to emphasize the most important bullet points about each feature.

• We created a page to talk specifically about Site5’s Ruby on Rails hosting capabilities. With the explosive growth Rails has seen, more and more people are coming to Site5 for Ruby on Rails hosting.

• We corrected several outstanding browser compatibility issues.

In addition to web site updates, we’ve also been making some behind the scenes fixes. Just because it’s not a street-facing window doesn’t mean it’s not important!

• We completely audited all of our email templates–from our welcome email to our billing invoices–for consistency, accuracy and, of course, grammar and spelling. First impressions count!

• Todd has been working with new Level III Systems Administrator Andrew Galloway on setting up several tools that will help us proactively address server performance issues. Further development of these systems will be a priority moving forward, and will eventually get the attention of the entire Engineering Team (cue ominous engineering theme song).

• Vince and Todd found that a new OS kernel provided an enormous performance boost. That kernel has now been deployed to all servers.

• Adam and I added functionality for managing past and current support tickets into Backstage. Many of our customers were sad to see it go when we made the transition from my.Site5 to Backstage.

• Kevin compiled a short survey that will be sent to new customers. The survey is aimed at helping us better understand who our customer base is and what they’re doing with their Site5 hosting account.

Over the coming days, Rod and I will be auditing, updating and expanding our knowledgebase in order to make it a more valuable resource, especially considering that nearly half the traffic to our site winds up there. If you have suggestions for ways we can improve this area of our site, please let us know.

That’s all for now. We’ll try to do a better job of keeping you in the loop henceforth. Much to my dismay, it’s been 12 days since our last blog post here (I guess that’s what happens when Kevin goes on a week-long Caribbean cruise). You have my word that the blog won’t go stale again… even if I have to make inane posts just to keep things fresh.

Cheers!
Matt

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