The Inside Connection had a very basic website that required a significant face-lift. The original site was developed using an 'over-the-counter' web development application similar to FrontPage. The company knew that they 'needed to be on the web', but really didn't know anything about getting there. An inexperienced employee of the company volunteered to be the webmaster.

The Inside Connection magazine is a monthly magazine that generates all of its revenue thru magazine advertising (there is no cover price). The volunteer on this project was a sales person in the organization so the need to have that person selling and not noodling with a website was critical to success of the company (not necessarily the web efforts). Using this inadequate although GUI web page development app the so-called webmaster was able to get the site updated with about 1/4 of the magazines content in about 2 days worth of effort. This was crazy.

The site needed not only a face lift but it needed a new way to deliver not only ALL of the magazine content, but MORE content than the magazine was able to have printed. The goal of the web needed to become an audience building vehicle, but it needed to be done efficiently without having an employee (with another job) taking 10% of their month away to make updates. Oh yes, not only were the pages updated but the previous months content was THROWN OUT!

Phase 1 was the redesign, this was actually a relatively simple and painless undertaking since there was already some graphical expertise in-house. Once the redesign was completed, an efficient content delivery engine needed to be created, which means that the site needed to become dynamically generated. A flat database was created to store the magazine as well as web exclusive content and then a set of ASP (Active Server Pages, this was a Windows hosting environment) pages were designed (using the graphical designs created by the graphics department) to directly access the content from the database. Once these pages were implemented the redesigned site was deployed.

The success of this implementation is two-fold. First, the magazine is now able to boast an archive of over 1 years worth of content. Second, the ease and simplicity of design has allowed the site to be modified several times in order to fine tune the site performance but also to create new revenue generating slots on the site. For more information on this second item, please consult case #5.