Ascentive's corporate homepage as it was in November 2005.

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Ascentive's Corporate Page

UPDATE: Recently, Ascentive has gone through major redesign; even the logo and motto have changed significantly. The new page (which is beautiful, by the way), has a sales-oriented feel to it as opposed to the previous corporate styled theme of before. So, with that said, continue on if you want to read my outdated notes on the page I made for them, which no longer exists.

Ascentive's old home page was created around 1998 and had been in need of an update for many years. Visitors will see similarities between current version home page and the current version of the Support Center, which makes sense since web sites should have a commonality throughout their pages.

This was not always the case, however, and the fact is the new corporate home page's design was actually based on the design of the Support Center section, and not the other way around.

The story goes like this:

• John creates a new Support Center design and hopes they like it.
• They do, and John eventually gets promoted to Support Manager.
• After a few years, the Support Center grows and grows into a dynamic and beautiful information resource, helping customer retention.
• Finally, John is asked to design a template for the rest of the site; one that matches the already established Support Center.

Pointing out a few things:

One big problem with the old site was that there were many, many static pages. Should something change, such as a program title or our phone number, someone would have to spend days hunting down every single instance of the wrong information. I wrote the homepage (which was going to also be used as a template) in PHP to address this inefficiency.

Now having the flexibility of PHP, I tried to add other neat features as well. For example, I programmed it to allow a person to automatically adjust the homepage to display different combinations of preset alternate text, graphics, and links (as well as places to define those things) for easy ad/promotion rotation. To make the adjustment, all an administrator had to do was change a single character in the adjoining "config" file. I also had the template set to grab some values I had previously setup over in the already established Support Center's "config" file.

Since I knew it was going to act as a template as well, I left places in the code where the administrator could define Meta information for each new page, such as the page title, keywords, description, etc. This would help with search engine optimization. I know with the multitude of pages I created for the Support Center, taking advantage of Meta Tag information really got it to rank well. So that nothing would ever be left blank, I even had it load generic default information from the "config" file when nothing was defined in the event someone forgot to enter in these values on any new page.

But, after handing it off, the page was dropped to just HTML as the art and marketing departments were not used to working with PHP files (or this is at least how I perceived it at the time). Now, while I do not usually like to be critical of my replacements, I'm making an effort to mention some things as my name still resides in the Meta Tag information for the author in the source. To start, viewing that source also shows very little whitespace being utilized, where the original code was neatly divided off into sections and paragraphs for easy viewing. Secondly, I've noticed that the navigation bars at the top and bottom of the pages have spacing problems now. Lastly, my name seems to have been carried over to all pages made with that template (privacy page, products pages, etc.) as well, which of course, I had barely little to do with.

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