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New websites CSS and Content Management

Well it's been a busy time here at Blue Sky getting our new site ready for launch. We've managed to cram so many new features into the new site that it's positively exciting just waiting for them to be revealed.

We made the sensible decision that the new site would be driven using our own content management system developed entirely within Blue Sky over the last three years. Now you may wonder why create your own CMS when so many alternatives already exist. Well the decisions are many and varied and probably for discussion at a different time but keeping it short our CMS allows us a level of expertise and control that someone else's simply couldn't.

It's feels like it's taken a long time to actually push on and get the new website up and running. One of the goals was to give Blue Sky a makeover and so we have a new logo, something with a simple elegance, and a new website layout. Lot's of things have changed since we developed the first and second Blue Sky websites (the second site was completed back in 2003) and things have moved on in terms of our experience and the tools we now use. For example the old site didn't make use of CSS or Content Management at all with everything set out in tables and each page working as a distinct entity. It made updates to the layout a major pain with the end result that we didn't have the time or inclination to commit to such levels of change and so nothing got done as we instead concentrated on customer projects.

Another of the design goals was to give Blue Sky's customers access to control their accounts with everything from controlling DNS to setting up additional mail accounts and hosting to checking invoices online. Over the next few weeks these features will become available and should give a level of control to our customers that was previously impossible. We've moved on such a long way from the early days both in terms of our skills and the expectations of the customer. Now if the customer cannot control their account they want to know why, back in 1999 we didn't even know customers would want to control these details themselves. As the level of expertise has increased it forces ourselves, the developers, to keep raising the bar resulting in better sites and tools for doing the jobs. Nowadays our CMS systems allow us to develop websites in a fraction of the time it used to take but more importantly we can modify and add to the sites without it becoming a major redesign issue. This in turn has the knock on benefit of enabling websites to become better maintained with more up to date information which in turn serves our customers customers better.

I hope you like the new website but if not let us know, and in the meantime I wish you all the best.

Chris (Technical Director)

May we work in interesting times . . .