theSnowSite.com is backup

The theSnowSite.com (a project being worked on by MMISoftware) is back up and running.

The theSnowSite.com was down for about a week whilst it underwent a major overhaul and update.

The ‘front-end’ looks different and is now more like a ‘traditional’ website, rather than a series of ‘floating windows’ (tests showed that users were not comfortable with that look and feel – plus there were some technical issues and problems with the approach, in particular it was not search engine friendly and pages were not being indexed or crawled). The site is still AJAX driven and uses live feeds (webservices) to provide weather data etc. The site also now has additional ‘news’ data provided from the a number of ski/boarding areas (there is still a lot of work to do on this).

There has also been significant changes made to the ‘back-end’, i.e. the database – which are not obvious to the user, but are there, and have improved site performance. Geocoding (also called geotags) has been improved with a number of earlier ‘location’ errors tracked down and dealt with (we have also added ‘geocoding’ data to the resort webpages – although this is not yet fully implemented), so mapped data is now more accurate (there are still a few ski/boarding areas to do/double check).

So, check the site out… theSnowSite.com