Another new site

The Mandogroup production line is rolling along very nicely indeed. Another site has gone live.

Big props to Ed, Rachel, Martin and the inimitable Mr Barnes.

Brookson CIS

Front side whore

We're in a busy period at the moment. We're getting a lot of work in, which is good. A lot of the work is subject to a rather strict delivery schedule, which is also good.

Deadline work doesn't bother me anymore. It used to, but I see each new "must be done by Thursday" ( never launch on a Friday :D ) effort as an opportunity for further refinement of the front-side craft. Things get tightened up. Potentially better approaches are explored, and normally, successfully implemented. The continued rollout of successive developments feeds into that in a big way. As a coder and web evangelist, I'm pretty much on an interminable mission to get quicker, better and more productive.

Thing is, I'm hating developing new content management features right now. We developed our CMS a year ago, and it has been used to launch shitloads of sites in the interim. My boss loves it, the clients love it, but personally, I really can't stand it any more.

The problem largely lies in the fact that I look around it, and see my current knowledge minus one year. I can't really change too much about it, as it's pretty established and importantly, working. For the moment, I'm stuck with it - but we've really got to get a new one in the bag - if only for my own sanity.

As a consequence, I've started to see front-side development as my only outlet for true innovation and progression. The two sites we launched last week have been performant, bug-free and vindication for the techniques we used to produce them.

Content management is going to change. Has to change. Yet I don't want to end up supporting legacy stuff any more than I really have to. As such, we're going to need a unified approach that'll address past, present and future needs. Sounds difficult, but solving the problem of everything is precisely the sort of challenge I need to make content management interesting again.

Two to go

A couple of new websites of mine have gone live. It's always a bit nerve-wracking when things go live. The environment shift is bad enough, but matters are complicated when you have to set an eCommerce payment gateway live at the same time.

The absolute nightmare from a launch perspective is when you get to redevelop an existing commerce site that is currently hosted elsewhere. It's the web design agency equivalent of cooking a roast dinner. Things have to be started at different times - the commerce go-live normally requires 48 working hours, and the DNS transfer can be up to 24 hours, depending on who's looking. If you don't get the timing right, your client will lose money.

Fortunately, these two went largely without incident. Here they are in all their glory.

• Tachodisc
• Liverpool Biennial

Don't get to do many projects from start to finish these days, so it was very nice to get these in the bag.