It's been a few years since the company's website makeover with ASP.NET 2.0, and since it was an intensive effort to combine website, blog, and user forums using a unified security scheme, I haven't been so keen on revisiting a new makeover.

However, times change, the company's focus has moved on, and the site could do more to serve the mission.  That said, defining the company's mission is more difficult than ever, so the technical direction is vital.

PalmPVT, the premier Corware software product is something we have always given away for free to researchers in the life sciences -- pretty much the only audience interested in a highly configurable portable reaction time test whose data can be uploaded from handheld device to PC for high-level analysis.

This group never used the forums, so that's going away. Likewise, there are much easier ways to host a blog and use syndication to display blog blurbs in a list on the main site, as I did with the http://jordanmartin.com website. So the cross-site integration requirement is eliminated, greatly simplifying the overall effort.

What remains is not trivial -- there is still plenty of legacy technical functionality to port.  Adding to the complexity of the effort is the problem of presentation, of coming up with a coherent concept that reflects what Corware is.  The company is a tag for who I am and what I do in the creative aspects of my life.  Historically, the company website has always served two purposes.

The first is to provide me a production environment playground to learn and apply the latest technologies so that my skills remain current and marketable.  The second purpose extends from being the sole source for the PalmPVT software, which has become an international standard in Pyschomotor Vigilance Tasks.  As author of the software we hold the copyright to its design, and although the Palm platform is just about dead, the software has been successfully ported to the Microsoft .NET platform, and sales of a potential derivative product are a distinct possiblityl.

We're committed to maintaining the availablility of the PalmPVT to maintain continuity for potential sales to a potential lucrative market in the future.  And we've become a bona fide music publishing company affiliated with BMI, with myself as the company's sole "signed" artist.

A few things are clear. Corware has morphed from a software consultancy to a publishing company.  The existing techology is aging and needs to be replaced.  The existing website theme doesn't reflect what I want out of it.  Yet I am still unsure of what I want it to do.

MVC and Entity Framework to the rescue.  Segementing functionality into controllers will allow work to commence on specific legacy functionality without committing to an overall conceptual organization.  I would like to incorporate WCF into the mix as well because I'm working with it now but am concerned about hosting. This is supposed to serve as an excerise in using new techologies so this will need to be build in such a way as to be deployable without WCF but be able to use it in the development environment.  An interesting challenge...I like it.

No doubt this will be a long effort before we see the new website since my plate is already pretty full!  Target...year's end...and maybe we'll get lucky!

Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site, Corware Web Site