Our New Website

At long last, we just released our new website. In a (not so distant) former life, I was a computer programmer specializing in custom business automation software. Now that I'm not doing that full time anymore, programming is fun again. So I decided to write our new website from scratch rather than relying on one of the hundreds of off-the-shelf website builder platforms.

After struggling with choosing which Microsoft platform to use I landed on Blazor Server. I briefly considered MVC and Razor, but Blazor really blends these together well while giving some of the rapid development capabilities of web forms. Ah web forms - I'm old enough to have used it since version 1.0 and am really bummed that it is no longer supported. There must be millions of app still using it and quite frankly, is still totally viable today, if Microsoft chose it to be.

Regardless, having total control of the website has allowed me to do things that will make using it in the future as easy as possible. For example:

1. When uploading project photos, they are automatically optimized, resized and watermarked!
2. There are some hooks into our BuilderTrend system to make tracking leads easier.
3. Page structure is simple, clean, and as friendly as possible for search engines. Compare the source of one of these pages to one of those website builders and it is so much cleaner and smaller.
4. The areas of the website that needs to be modified (like any CMS will allow) have that ability, but gone is the ability to completely trash the site by clicking the wrong button (hopefully this holds true after Jacky gets her hands on it).

Do I want to write code full-time again? Heck no! Was it a fun project? Yes. Would I do it again? We'll see...