It's (A)LIVE!!!

 OMG!!! I can't believe it but Link2Portal has actually gone live! I'm so amazed and astounded that we got it out today.  The site has been almost ready to go live since 1st Feb (it's original live date) and our boss decided today at 2pm would be the go live time.  I'm proud of us all for getting the site out today, despite all the little snags that have been passed to us over the past few days.  It really doesn't help when your boss is not in the office and thus all the things that were told "couldn't" happen are now being asked of - whilst the cats away I suppose!

Now that the majority of the site has been finished off and fixed if necessary, I have been tasked with getting all the paid-for listings in a nice format.  The old Link2Portal site had about 1000 companies that had paid for enhancements but no one thought to consider how the new site would look with the old layout.  For starters, the width of the old site was about 600px, whereas on the new site it is 400px.  Then there are the images to take into consideration.  The old site didn't handle multiple images and thus all images supplied by the clients had to sit within the content body.  However, the new site handles multiple images but taking them out of the content body and inserting them in to the section they need to sit in is a manual process.  I'm glad there were only a few videos - all those have been uploaded to the Link2Portal YouTube channel and sit nicely within the site.

I have to say one of my colleagues who was blessed with the task of creating the directory service has done a brilliant job at it.  He has used CouchDB and the Amazon Web Services to create a link between our internal systems and the website itself.  The GUI he has put together is rough but to be honest he isn't paid to do design work, he's paid to build brilliant systems and that is what he has done.  I thought I would pipe up when it came to putting a simple enough design on the GUI.  In my opinion, I don't think it needs a designer on it, it just needs a way of looking presentable and usable and that is what I am going to do (once the listings look ok).

I think the next thing on the cards is to teach the people who will be enhancing the listings in Macclesfield - who that will be is another question entirely...