Cannon's new website

[cubco]

Bold and Beautiful

One interesting little side note is that their weekday combo pass with Bretton Woods has gone back down to the $249 level of a couple of years ago. Last year they had raised it to $299, which was still a great deal, IMHO. I'm psyched!

 

[skibum1321]

Ok, so now we're going to get into the in house designer vs. hiring some outside firm like Propeller / Circus / Snowspin.

I come from the in house design school at Sunday River, I'd say that 90% of our site is has been developed in house, the 10% that isn't is related to the backend features of the website that are around 4 years old and are in the process of being phased out. As many of you geeks are aware, the site is powered by PHP and mySQl. It also uses CSS for the text stylesheets, I wish the site was position based, that will probably happen in the future, but the current framework would require a ton of development time to convert to a css position based template.

You guys are still using tables for layout? That's old school. I was trying to get into a web design company last spring unti I realized how much less I would be making than if I worked for a traditional software company. I was more into the actual coding than the design although I did a lot of CSS. Bock in Burlington and Pixelmedia in Portsmouth, NH were a couple of the ones that I had interviewed with. But now I'm working on missiles at Raytheon for more money and less enjoyment. At least I'll have enough money to ski though. Unfortunately don't have time to do anymore web design in my spare time.

This is all so off topic, but oh well.

 

[salida]

Ok, so now we're going to get into the in house designer vs. hiring some outside firm like Propeller / Circus / Snowspin.

I come from the in house design school at Sunday River, I'd say that 90% of our site is has been developed in house, the 10% that isn't is related to the backend features of the website that are around 4 years old and are in the process of being phased out. As many of you geeks are aware, the site is powered by PHP and mySQl. It also uses CSS for the text stylesheets, I wish the site was position based, that will probably happen in the future, but the current framework would require a ton of development time to convert to a css position based template.

The flash banner at the top of the winter homepage has three backend controls...

1. Normal - It shows the picture of the mountain covered in snow.

2. Snowmaking - As some of you have seen, it shows a cloud of snow over some of the bread and butter trails.

3. Snow - This places the snow graphic on the image that shows flakes falling over the image.

When the snow-repoter logs in to do their morning/afternoon report, adjusting the homepage banner is something that they have to do. It is simply a pulldown box that activates the three separate functions.

IMHO, Circus does an AMAZING job creating CSS position based sites with insanely customizable features and backend items for content management. That all comes at a cost...

Ohh yeah, some other reasons why it pays to have an in house design team...

1. We run phpBB. Yep, we're one of the last resorts to still host our own message board ;-) I catch a ton of flak for being such a hard-ass, but if the msg board is going to stick around you've got to play rough with the punks. AZ runs the same shizz.

2. Photopost. Lets us whip up a gallery in minutes. I'm psyched to see that Alex used it to whip up a couple snowmaking galleries already. I'm going to be using it this season for weekly photo galleries.

3. Custom RSS Feeds. The snow report is now available as an XML feed. Hopefully the event calendar and What's Happening will be available. Small steps.

By using open source apps we can post feature rich content quickly and present it professionally. Opposed to waiting for a customized app from the site developers.

Not to mention SR has Nick Lambert, resident brand management, photographer, web designer, etc. Good luck finding another resort that has someone on the payroll that wear that many hats and pull of that kind of pro material.

It is 11:15 on a Friday night, what the hell am I doing here? Back to cards and continuing my farewell weekend... And Sky, no, I don't know about CO yet. This is my annual "We're not going to see Dave until May party", not the "Dave is moving to CO to work at Freeskier" party... Which, could be happening soon as long as my resume pays off.

http://www.ozskier.com/blog/2005/11/dave-amirault-farewell-tour.html

Dave Nice Post man....

Appreciate all the details.

Taking from what you said, the only other in house site that I am aware of is SnowJournal's Admin, that works for Crotched Mountain, they use content managing software, however the php like software is all privately written by the Admin. Seems to work out pretty well. Sunday River does indeed have a good site. I'm impressed with your interface that you have used at OZskier. One of the things you stated was that:

By using open source apps we can post feature rich content quickly and present it professionally. Opposed to waiting for a customized app from the site developers.

I believe in my personal dealings with circus and them making the Atomic site for us is that they build in apps that allow us to change content and update flash headers for instance. So yes circus designs the site, but they design it so it is highly customizeable by the owner. So in effect you dont have to wait for customized apps by the site developer.

1. We run phpBB. Yep, we're one of the last resorts to still host our own message board ;-) I catch a ton of flak for being such a hard-ass, but if the msg board is going to stick around you've got to play rough with the punks. AZ runs the same shizz.

One of the issues with this is like all php sites they are vulnerable to hacks, as we have seen with other boards in the past like First Tracks or Telemark Tips, often loosing content on the site. This is not as large a deal for forums as it would be for a business like Sunday River. If Sunday River were struck by a php hack program it would present difficulties for sure. As for code that crotched runs, because it is homemade it is not vulnerable to these hacks. A definite plus...


The point I'm getting to with all of this is, that yes I certainly believe that an in house programmer is very valuable because it creates a degree of customization that is not available otherwise. However, most areas do not have this luxury, so sites that circus and others create will have to suffice. Yet, the management software used is more vulnerable that others... Not that I understand why a hacker would want to hake a ski site?

Anyways like I said before, props on your site, and keep up the good work.

-Porter

Bentley Ski and Snowboard Club[/url]

 

[Greg]

1. We run phpBB. Yep, we're one of the last resorts to still host our own message board ;-) I catch a ton of flak for being such a hard-ass, but if the msg board is going to stick around you've got to play rough with the punks. AZ runs the same shizz.

One of the issues with this is like all php sites they are vulnerable to hacks, as we have seen with other boards in the past like First Tracks or Telemark Tips, often loosing content on the site. This is not as large a deal for forums as it would be for a business like Sunday River. If Sunday River were struck by a php hack program it would present difficulties for sure. As for code that crotched runs, because it is homemade it is not vulnerable to these hacks. A definite plus...

This is true. And part of the reason I hesitate to add any more phpBB mods than we already have. You all know based on the last experience of upgrading the forum, it can be a nightmare to get all mods working correctly as new phpBB patches are released. With that said, I try to be diligent in keeping ths forum's software up-to-date. I would sacrifice reinstalling one of the mods if it meant not being able to upgrade. So much of this site relies on the forum database's integrity (e.g. News) that I can't risk it not running on the latest and most secure (for the time being...) version. I have nightly database dumps scheduled as well so I should have a backup to restore from if something goes really awry.