A fresh coat of wax

One of the challenges of doing web work for other folks is it seems you never quite have the time to invest into your own site. Our old site wasn’t bad, but we felt that it hadn’t kept up with the company. We wanted a visual identity that matched our team.

The look

Since Chris McCroskey is such an avid comic book reader, he had the great idea of getting some professional artwork done and bringing some personality to the site. Cal Slayton did an awesome job on drawing each of us and really bringing us to life in cartoon form.

The result was our own take on Ghost Busters, but instead of scary ghosts and monsters, we battle bad code and scope creep!

The platform

An important goal for the redesign was to lower the overhead of keeping it up-to-date. We discovered Webby, a Ruby tool that makes it incredibly simple to create dynamic web sites and deploy them as static content. Since we hang out in a our favorite text editor all day, Webby lets us add pages and blog articles as naturally as any other task. We no longer have to write within the confines of a teeny textarea.

Comments

Since Webby isn’t a server, we needed a way to support comments on our blog posts. There are a number of free tools popping up that let you outsource your comments including IntenseDebate and JS-Kit. We decided to use Disqus because it was the easiest for us to use and import our older comments.

Twitter feed

We’ve long had a Tweetstream on Locomotivation, our programming and technology blog. Since the server-side approach we used there would not work on a static site, we went looking for alternatives. I found Tweet from seaofclouds.

With a slight modification to support multiple users, we were up and running with a pure jQuery solution. Woot!

Hope you like the new site!