Evolution of a Website

TechTourSite.com was originally a very small microsite of just a few pages with limited capabilities. I inherited the site from my predecessor a couple of years ago and it has been fascinating to see the scope of this initiative grow each year. Last year the site was redesigned to refine the look and feel and include more information on the site. Shortly thereafter it became obvious that the site needed a major overhaul as scope creep continued. Tech Tour is now an international event.

 

No surprise to any regular reader of thoughtsparks.net, the site was rebuilt in WordPress. It features some nifty plug-ins and functions:

• Expandable side navigation
• Eloquent form submission
• Templates which allow for some nice multi-lingual options
• Custom fields which come in real handy for unique datasets

The site will continue to grow incrementally with new features such as a photo gallery and other bells and whistles. I think I will truly enjoy not doing a major redesign or redevelopment of the site next year (knock on wood).

Lest my PhP development skills get too rusty, I’m starting on another microsite for the IEEE EMC Symposium for 2009 that will be hosted in Austin. More about that one as the project moves along. One cool feature will be a dynamic schedule configurator for attendees to select their workshops to attend. Will be a hoot to develop for sure.