A long and winding road to get to the new VIBCO.com

Going off the beaten path can be an exhilarating process... filled with danger, excitement, joy at conquering challenges, and the thrill of the unknown.

But sometimes going off the beaten path just turns into a long, arduous slog through challenging terrain.  Such has been our journey to relaunch VIBCO.com.  But here's some encouraging news...  you're reading this blog post, which means we've finally reached a key milestone on our VIBCO.com adventure!  

So what were the stumbling blocks?  What were our lessons learned?  What would we do differently if we had to do it all again?

For our team, the biggest challenge was that, in partnership with our developers, we selected a content management system that was a release candidate versus a fully vetted solution.  We did this, in part, because the release candidate promised a level of functionality missing from the current version.  Robust search, fully accessible product database, easy edit ability, fully integrated blogware, and discussion boards (yet to be released now... harrumph).

We made the mistake of hubris... that we'd "figure it out" and be able to quickly exterminate the inevitable bugs.  I'll just say that we needed the world's largest can of RAID.  We even needed more than Tony DeJesus and Nibbles Woodaway could do!  (non-Rhode Islanders should click this wiki link... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Blue_Bug)  

Despite the massive extermination project, we're live and kicking and VIBCO.com is better than ever!  Some of the key improvements include:

• more interactive content that allows VIBCO fans, users and dealers to comment and interact right on VIBCO.com
• ability to easily share VIBCO.com content on any social network
• strategic navigation that gives site visitors alerts and easy access to the newest content on VIBCO.com
• an improved mobile user experience on VIBCO.com 
• streamlined product pages with easier access to technical and dimensional data, accessories, and related manuals and literature
  
• product testimonials and customer reviews appear right on the product pages
• clearer, more specific product descriptions
• improved site search functionality
• enhanced galleries and an integrated application library

In addition to these improvements, we finally have the ability to create dynamic, meaningful and relevant content "on the fly" so we can make sure that each VIBCO.com site visitor quickly and easily finds what s/he is looking for.

Thanks for visiting the new VIBCO.com!