Haunted House Website upgrade?

My first website while not much to look at, was very functional. After all it got the job done. In other words the site conveyed information and was very successful at bringing customers to the event. The last major revision was in 2001 "yea I know" my-Bad. In 2001 several things were changing in terms of marketing on the Internet and what was state of the art in web design then was not ageing well in mid 2009. So I decide "with much needed nudging from the world at large" that it's time to completely toss out the old frame-based site in favor of the new. Well it's not that easy~ now faced with CMS "Content Management Systems" Joomla, Word Press, CSS2,CSS3,PHP Dynamic based sites?? Where to go? What to do? - IE8 is out! OK. So no clear path lay in front of me.

What I decided to do was look at our current traffic. And that surprised me to say the least. Browser share and Monitor Resolution were my two areas of concern. I learned the hard way that just because you design at 2560x1600 doesn't mean that your customers will view at that screen size. So as of today Aug 6th 2009: 28.73% of visitors to http://www.theboneyard.org/ do so using IE6; 26.70% are on IE7; and only10.76% are fling IE8. FireFox, Safari & Opera bring up the rear in the low single digits.

Well after that stimulating foray into the wonderful world of browsers my choice was clear. Design the new site to be IE6 compliant. So for now we have decided to push the new site in three phases. Phase one is CSS2 based using PHP, a dynamic site that is database driven. The site was uploaded on Aug the 4th. And in my opinion... a well deserved make-over. Phase two will be implemented after this years Haunted House Season. And will be CSS3 based using the new CSS.table based system. Coding will allow for older browsers. Phase three will take place when 90% of visitors to our site are CSS3 compliant.

So for all of you out there that wanted the latest greatest bells and whistles? Well for now we are going to go with the numbers and give the customers what they want! Content that's designed for the browsers that are in use..... Well we did add a few things that make this site a bit more current. At least in terms of information. One of my favorite additions is Dynamic Barcode generation! What’s so cool about Barcodes you ask? well take a look at our web Coupon this year, better yet print one out and use it at the Boneyard. The barcode on the coupon is a dynamically generated Jpeg. It is a new picture each time the Coupon page is displayed. That code is stored in our Database and when the Coupon is present at the ticket window we can automatically tell when it was printed, where it was printed, the browser it came from, the monitor is was displayed on etc. For me that's good to know when I am deciding on content for the site.

Well I have gone on enough about the new site, And I will admit web design is not my favorite aspect of running a Haunted House. It's just one of the things that has to be done. Take some time and look at the new site. http://www.theboneyard.org/ let me know what you think.

Thanks for taking the time to read our post and we look forward to seeing you one dark windy night at the Boneyard.