Man, that was pretty much the roughest website launch I’ve ever had. You know it’s just perfect when the CEO happens to be pulling up your website in the three minute span of time that the new site is coming up. It’ll just be a few minutes we thought in our naïveté; who will notice? Ha ha!
CEO. Conference room. Pretty much all upper management. Our site. Broken rendering. Yeah.
But it’s launched so woo! It’s better than ever. You can now actually use our site to automatically price business Internet options for any address/phone line in the US. We hit the carrier APIs and pull back the best prices we can get automatically. No need for you to have an account, no personal information required, no sales people calling because you priced an address: just internet pricing data.
Of course there’s no resting here. I have a bunch of ideas for taking the site even further, but I’m once again happy to point folks to broadband.com and say “Yeah, I made that.”
I pulled my first late-late night at work Thursday night and Friday
morning this week to launch the new broadband.com. We actually had a
lot of fun coding pepped up on pizza and caffeine. I stayed until 4:30am
and was the last of the team to leave, but our (awesome) boss kept
working on content and ended up sleeping on a couch at work. I drove
home and slept for about three hours then headed back in for the final
push.
Friday was a day of fun and games (and launch t-shirts!) celebrating the site launch which was scheduled for 4pm. We were still heads down working on getting all the pieces together and, whew!, got completely deployed at 3:45pm. Just in time for the official launch but after the launch party down the street had started. :-)
Launch party? Yeah, I’d never had one of those either. The company
rented out the party room at Rally Point and our whole company group
(about 40 people) was in full attendance. I gotta say, it was a lot of
fun to be cheered and applauded while drinking free beer and grooving to
the awesome music of Mystery Sushi.
It was definitely a crunch for the team, and happily we came together
perfectly. We have two primarily backend developers and I’m one of two
frontend devs. Our backend guys really turned it all out this week too.
At the start of the week we had no full production servers, and now we
have some kind of crazy auto load balancing cluster of web and database
servers all out on Amazon. It was pretty amazing to catch glimpses of
that while we coded out the rails site.
IE almost ruined my whole day on Friday, but I got it at least to the
point of functionality. (Yeah, we are explicitly allowed to treat IE as
a second-class browser.)
Special shoutout to comfortable mexican sofa. The best CMS I’ve ever
used. We need to refactor huge swaths of our site, but the system itself
is pure gold.
Yeah, the site isn’t perfect (yet), but it’s out there.
