Website update

Just updated the MMISoftware website. No real major changes from the user point of view, but some major changes to the ‘back-end’ in terms of page design and layout.

The site designed in 2001 and so was 8 years old (so, if you buy the argument that one year is 7 Internet years, then the site was 56 years old!). When it was first produced it was designed to be viewed in the browsers ‘of the day’, that is browsers such as the original Internet Explorer for the Mac, and Internet Explorer v5 on Windows.

These browsers were not very good at handling cascading style sheets (css). Lets face it, they just couldn’t. So everything was designed around tables for the main layout, plus a little css. This meant pages were very large, were slow to load, very difficult to maintain (as there was a ton of nested table code getting in the way), and it was difficult to keep style consistent across the many different pages. Basically, yuck.

When the site was originally built I was using ‘GoLive’, a WYSIWYG editor for html (this was because I had a lot of nested tables for the layout, which were very time consuming and difficult to deal with ‘by hand’ using a text editor), and have since moved to Coda, CSSEdit, BBEdit, and Expresso for my main html work. However, the MMISoftware site was very difficult to edit and maintain using these programs because of all the old legacy html code.

So, the update was long overdue. The main site uses css for layout, with no tables. This is great. It is now a snap to edit and maintain. Another feature that has been added (which the user does not see) is the main navigation sections/menus, footers and header, are ‘delivered’ by php so a change to one file is propagated across the whole site. (Content Management.)

Finally, it has also provided a good opportunity to ‘blow a few cobwebs’ out of the site, that is, I was able to remove some old pages and sections that are no longer used, and generally tidy things up a bit.

And, one new feature added, a ‘Latest News’ section, which is driven by Twitter, so you can now follow MMISoftware on Twitter – MMISoftware on Twitter.

Excellent!