Project name: Shaxon
Role: Developer
Shaxon.com is the online catalog for Shaxon Industries, Inc. a medium sized cable manufacturing corporation. Their current website at www.shaxon.com was made by my predecessor rougly 5 years ago and has only been minimally maintained since. It has been a goal of mine to remake this site with more modern techniques and styles.
The current shaxon.com consists of about 10 individual pages, one of which is a product page attached to a database so that you can view the products. It is currently written using ASP, and lacks many of the features of a modern interactive website. Because the code for this site is many years old and it is not a particularly complicated site, i've determined that it would be easier to re-make the site from scratch.
Phase 1: Build a new shaxon.com
Status: Diverted, project goals changed
At Shaxon Industries I have many roles, one of which is to work on the websites, however, frequently my web site duties have been put aside in favor of other more graphic design oriented projects. It was originally my goal to make a whole new shaxon.com from scratch, that design can be seen here to the right. After many months this project remaining low in the priority of management, I determined that it would be necessary to lower my goal if I ever wanted to see any results.
Phase 2: Rebuild the site using PHP
Status: Complete
In order to get something done actually, I came up with a new idea. Instead of building the site from scratch which would have required remaking a database with thousands of product listings I decided to salvage it. The old database is full of innacuracies, and the product images are not the best, however I figured it was better to have a new site even with old info, than the same old site forever.
Around this time I was presented with a new problem, several of our vendors wanted to have an FTP site so that we could easily transfer images and other large documents. The problem was, our current hosting service wanted to charge an unacceptable fee for each new FTP account, additionally I realised that the hosting service (which hosts ASP sites only) was charging way more that equivalent Linux based PHP hosts.
With this information in hand i easily convinced management that it would be worthwhile and quick to remake the site in PHP and switch hosts.
Phase 3: Port the site to the Kohana Framework
Status: Underway
When I first began working on the shaxon site rebuild I was not aware of the Kohana framework (or any framworks for that matter), however through my experience with making the Gymji.com site realized that this is a much more efficient method for site development. Additionally using the Kohana MVC model I realised that we would more easily be able to implement an affiliate site program for our vendors which is something that they had been enquiring about. So with this in mind I wrote up a proposal to my management and they agreed to let me go ahead with the project
With phase 2, I am bringing a quicker development model to this project. Instead of building the site on a live external host requiring constant uploads of new pages, I have installed a local server using XAMPP. This has already speed up the process considerably. On my local machine I now have a basic shell of both the new shaxon.com as well as a generic affiliate site. This project should be completed spring of 2010.