The Armchair Politician

Well, it’s not really versioned, but we released the new version of my company’s website over the weekend (Friday morning, actually). I had photoshopped a few usability changes (just for the front page, although the rest of the site could use leagues more), which I sent to the developers about two months ago, but none of them seemed to bother listening to the suggestions. Due to problems with the developers’ code, it took us the better part of the week to do it.

On Monday, we went to our colocation provider to begin the switchover to the new version. Upon bringing the machine up and testing out the site, it didn’t work. Lo and behold, we had changed the database schema on our testing platform and none of the developers bothered to remember this.

Wednesday comes, and the database schema has been updated to the correct version. We start to test the new website and oops, it’s not decrypting credit card numbers correctly. This wasn’t really the developers’ fault (it was an undocumented problem with some third-party software we were using), but with more logging it probably wouldn’t have taken as long as it did to fix.

Finally on Friday we’ve sorted out the decryption issues and go up to release the new version. Oops, the database hasn’t been completely updated to the latest schema. So after a few phone calls and running commands on the database, we finally get it up and running.

The developers promised both me and management that the new version fixed many of the problems with the old site (a frequent database deadlock, for one). And would you know it, but we’re having more problems. The deadlock is even more frequent, and there are tons of broken links and PHP bugs everywhere. It looks better, but even then the overall usability of the site is still piss poor. Like I said, I’ve made suggestions and they’ve all been ignored. I’m not exactly an expert, but Jordi’s knowledge and interest in the topic has, in a small way, rubbed off on me.

We had hired a new web developer to improve the layout and look of the site. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he knows much about usability. Just another Dreamweaver junkie who knows how to make things look shiny, but doesn’t seem to have a clue how to make it easy to use, standards-compliant, or intelligently integrate with CSS.

/sigh