Posts in Web Development

Walter Johnson, hall of fame pitcher for the Washington Senators in the 1920s, was asked the secret of his success. He responded simply “You can't hit what you can't see.” Walter Johnson worked to be one of the hardest throwing pitchers the game has ever known.

In the current web site redesign process, Walter Johnson’s words are still true. It will be easy to hit the visual elements of the redesign because we can see them. It will be easy to say “Yes, I love the overlap of those images” or “No, I do not like that color pallet at all”. It will be easy to say “I love the creative content on this page” or “No, that presentation of content is not acceptable”. Those are sensory elements that we see and react to with passion.

What we cannot see are those elements going into the redesign behind the scenes. A completely new architecture will replace one Apache web server with two new virtual servers. It will replace a single application server with four new virtual servers. It will provide load balancing between our servers to keep any server from being overrun. It will provide capacity to for using web tools such as streaming video and Bethel’s own Bubblequest without disrupting our external web site.

Like Walter Johnson, it takes hard work to develop something you cannot see. Bethel’s web site redesign process is moving forward with a lot of hard work on the network team, the systems administration team and the web services team. Network load balancing is in place. New virtual servers are handling the load. New front-end Apache servers are being designed and made ready for service. In other words there is a lot of hard work going on where it cannot be seen to give Bethel a web presence that will be robust and fault tolerant as well as attractive and compelling.

One of the things I enjoy about my job as the director of web technology is getting to dream up solutions to peoples problems. Occasionally we get to implement some of those solutions for our team.

Last week we launched two new widgets. The first, a visual timeline that displays our progress throughout the redesign. The second is an email subscription to our blog that delivers blog posts directly to your email.  Check them out and let us know if they are helpful by commenting on this post.

Many of you have inquired about our content management system, called Silva, asking if we'll be getting a new one during the redesign. For some of you, the prospect of a new system is exciting. For others, the prospect is terrifying.

In light of that, Web Services is working to create a win-win for both groups. We won't be getting rid of Silva during this redesign. However, we'll be making some drastic improvements—starting with a upgrade sometime this summer that will fix and improve a number of baseline features.

Later this year, we'll roll out larger changes to the core of Silva. Please check back for announcements about these upcoming changes. I think you'll find that in the end we'll have a much improved content management system.