I’m very pleased with the new King Design web site - this is a good thing since I’ve been working on it for months now. Visually, I believe it accomplishes my twin goals of simple professionalism and ease of use/navigation.
There are a ton of new systems in place on the new site, so please let me know if anything seems broken.
I’ll be writing a series of blog entries about how the site was created and some of the decisions, challenges and solutions that appeared through the development process.
- Overview
- Site Goals
- Downloads and Customer Management
- Forum Integration
- Code Exchange Forums
- Customer Resources (FAQs, Recommended Hosts, Translation Kit)
- Search is Important
- Using WordPress 1.5 as a Web Site CMS
- WordPress Hacking Tips
- Cross-browser Compatibility
- Web Development Tools
- SVN as a Web Site Maintenence Tool
- Automating Processes (trials, rss, upgrade links)
This entry is an overview of some of the new things the site has to offer.
Navigation
I rev’ed the navigation design a few times, finally settling on the design you see here. Initially, I had ‘Download’, ‘Support’ and ‘Forums’ in the side menu and had the Search field up in the upper right corner. This made the side menu feel cluttered - too many items total and too many different types of pages all lumped together. I think this works better, the things my customers will likely need to access most are prominently located at the top of the screen.
Download Area
The new site is now the single download point for all King Design software. In the previous releases, the Tasks download login was on alexking.org while the Tasks Pro™ download login was on taskspro.com.
Receive Your Lost License Key by E-mail
In the event a customer misplaces their license key, they can enter their e-mail address into this form and an e-mail will be sent to them with all of their license keys. I hope this will save me a few support e-mails as some folks who want to download the new versions will have inevitably lost their license keys.
King Design Forums
I’ve moved the forums for Tasks Pro™, Tasks and Tasks Jr. to the kingdesign.net domain. Actually, the forums are still in the same database as the forums that are still on alexking.org, I just did a little hacking to allow both sites to use the database (more on this in a later post). The big benefit of this is that all registered alexking.org forum members already have an account on the King Design forums. If a user changes their information in one forum, it is change for both, etc. Unfortunately, I can’t do a single sign-on since the forums are on separate domains.
The King Design forums also sport code exchange forums for registered Tasks Pro™ and Tasks users
Expanded FAQs
It’s possible that people may find some answers in the FAQs now that they are searchable, but mainly these are there so I can e-mail out URLs to answer support questions. 
More details later…
Popularity: 10% [?]
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
As I’m sure I’ve told you, I think the site looks great.
March 7th, 2005 at 10:12 am
jstownsley adds this Comment:
Really interested in hearing your comments on wordpress as a cms. Looks great.
March 7th, 2005 at 12:31 pm
jstownsley.com adds this Trackback:
Wordpress as a cms
Alex King has just launched his company website using wordpress as a CMS. Really interesting, can’t wait to see what he has to say about it….
March 7th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
Dougal Campbell adds this Comment:
Excuse me, sir. I’m officer Campbell with the Background Color Police.
I’m afraid that I need to issue you a warning….
March 7th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Always the black sheep.
March 7th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
John adds this Comment:
Looks great Alex! I’ve been following your journey in self-employment and it looks like you’ve done a great job.
March 8th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
King Design Site Goals
When I decided to create a full site for my business, I had three main goals in mind:
A home for my commercial products and development services.
A central resource for my customers.
A back-end framework that would make site maintenence easy,…
March 12th, 2005 at 5:41 pm
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Downloads and Customer Management
Note: this is one of a series of posts about the creation of the King Design web site.
One of the things I wanted to do with the new King Design web site was make it easier for my customers to download my software - including language files and any …
March 14th, 2005 at 12:42 pm
sameer adds this Comment:
this is quite a nice (design-wise) and informative site.
cheers.
January 11th, 2007 at 3:22 am