Converting a site from PHP to ColdFusion 8 using the New Media CMS

We recently took on the re-development of a reasonably busy website with a large amount of mixed content that was originally written in a mix of straight HTML and dynamic php pages with around 130 pdf documents as well.

The overall health of the site prior to re-development was not great. There were a hundred or so faulty links, pointing to .htm files instead of .php files and vice versa which resulted in a couple of hundred 404 page not found errors. The HTML that the site used wasn't standards compliant which caused rendering issues in some of the less popular browsers and the sites search engine rankings were poor due to a lack of decent search engine optimisation on the site. From an accessibility point of view, the site would only work correctly if JavaScript and full image capabilities were enabled and it looked just awful on mobile devices.

Mobile internet usage on the rise

According to an article on the BBC news site today, usage of the Internet through mobile devices (phones, pda's etc.) is on the rise.

So, what does this mean for website owners?

Well, for one it means that the quality of your website will have to be top notch. In order to guarantee that your website works well on any device and not just the many versions of Internet Explorer. This is something we've been advocating for years and endeavour to achieve as much as possible whilst we meet our clients requirements for their sites.

For another it means that your site audience demographic will be changing, mobile Internet users are in general younger than the traditional PC/mac/Linux user and being mobile, require that the content they see is speedy, on point and easy to navigate.

Simply hoping that mobile browser technology will cope with your website is not enough. To get the best out of your site on mobile devices, you have to make sure that it is standards compliant and accessible.

"But isn't all that just for users with disabilities?" I hear you cry.

Well, the short answer is No....

The beauty of fault tolerance

This week, we had a drive failure with one of our production servers. It's the first hardware glitch we've had with a production server in five years so I guess you could say we were due for one and I certainly hope it's another five years before we see another!

The drive failed on Saturday morning but the server remained on-line serving websites for the duration of the incident which wasn't fully resolved until Wednesday due to some erroneous information coming from the diagnostics utilities. We knew that one drive had failed, the problem was, which one. One diagnostics tool reported drive 0 had failed, the other reported drive 1.

What to do, what to do?