Another site launch. I realized today that I neglected to mention another site that I launched a few weeks ago: the web site for the CFC Conference 2008 that we are holding on Montreal next November. For the design of the identity elements and the web site itself, we worked with two fine folks from Montreal: Eric Demay and Patrick Tanguay. Eric handled the design of the logo, while Patrick designed the web site. We're very happy with the results. I'm hoping we'll be able to work together on other projects in the future.

The site was originally intended to be built using SharePoint, but the platform meltdown that we suffered mid-August prevented us from doing so. Short version: the publishing services failed for no apparent reason, something to do with running AD and SharePoint on the same server, and starting with the trial version and upgrading it to a full license. Things are better now that we have a separate server for AD, and did a complete rebuild of the machines with a clean install of SharePoint.

I ended up coding the conference site manually, which overall wasn't so bad. In some ways it was easier, since I didn't have to wrestle with how to implement the design in SharePoint. It was a lot more tedious to build, though, and all the markup had to go through me, which is not the best use of my time. It was worse for the Vital Signs sites, since there was four of them, lots of content to markup (including tables, footnotes, etc), and changes and content coming at me from several people in different organizations. Again, many, many hours spent doing things that, with a CMS or publishing platform of any sort, are usually automated. At least everything has worked out.

Although manually coding the sites was my contingency plan, I think it is something that, in the future, I need to work harder to avoid. Or, at the very least, have a few contractors in place that I can outsource the work to. (Aside: I did outsource the markup for one of the local report sites to Industrial Media, which was really the only way I was able to succeed with the other sites. Many thanks to them for coming through on short notice.)

Now that these sites are launched, I can move onto my next web publishing project: our public web site.