New Inman.com Site Goes Live
I have new found respect for what the Zillow folks must go through every time they release a new version of their site.
We just spent the weekend pushing the new Inman News site live.
You can see the result over on Inman.com right now. I should warn you the site is getting hammered right now so it’s running vvveeerrrry slllooowwwly.
To give you some background on the new site:
- We started work on this project almost a year ago, shortly after I joined Inman News.
- The goal was to bring all our web properties (Connect, InmanWiki, News, Blog, InmanTV) under one tent and tie them all together. Easier said than done with multiple platforms and languages (Wordpress, Typepad, MediaWiki, ASP, HTML)!
- Inman.com is now a LAMP site.
- We wanted to kick open the doors to the archives and still provide valuable new offerings to Inman members.
- We wanted to explore the social/community side of news like the folks at FastCompany and USAToday did, so we introduced some limited social networking elements to the new site. But we were definitely conscious of ’social network fatigue’ and didn’t want to replicate experiences already found elsewhere online.
- We also felt it necessary to include a number of new voices in our new home, so we built a fantastic real estate blog network (that includes FOREM, natch) and invited some well known bloggers to join our team.
- The site is built on the Drupal platform, a very powerful open source CMS system; with a ton of customization done by Toolhouse Design, our development team.
- This is only version 1.0 – we have some very cool stuff scheduled on the roadmap, which we hope to be rolling out over the coming months. So stay tuned.
I hope you like it!
Drew Meyers from Zillow | Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for the newfound respect
We’re very fortunate to have a very talented development and operations team.
Back to Inman, congrats on getting the site live and working through the launch hickups. I like what you’ve done with version 1.0, and am looking forward to future iterations of Inman. I’m sure I’ll send you some specific suggestions in the coming weeks as I start to use the site.
Jay Thompson | Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Congrats Joel (and the whole Inman team)! Job well done. I did my best to break it in Beta but wasn’t too successful! (but I’ll keep trying…
)
Dan Woolley | Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Congrats – new site looks good. I would be very interested in a future blog post discussing the decision making process around choosing Drupal and the trials and tribulations of getting that to production. Drupal has been getting a lot of good press lately, so I’d be interested in your teams perspective.
Hi! I'm Rudy from Trulia. Congrats Team Inman! | Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Hi Joel!
LAMP, Drupal……whoa….don’t get too tech on us now
All the best with the new site. Looking good thus far…
Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia
Brian Columbus | Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
The site is a big improvement. It’ll be interesting to see how the Social aspects workout. It would be great to see more rich media.
Louis Cammarosano | Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Joel
Very nicely done!
We were happy to see not only an article about HomeGain’s blog on Inman News inauguration day but also one of our Max the HomeGain gorilla ads running proudly to the side of it.
Keep up the good work.
Louis
Joel Burslem | Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
Thanks everyone! The site is running a little slow right now – massive interest in the new site collapsed our servers and we’re rebuilding. Bear with us for a few more days and we should have everything rectified.
Chris Mancini | Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
I am really impressed Joel. I have used Drupal in the past and I really enjoyed the scalability and the community behind Drupal. I think it was a great choice.
If traffic numbers stay static or increase, I highly recommend subscribing to more bandwidth
Chris
Faster Pages Please | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
Hey Joel, the new Inman site is too slow. Have you guys done any work to make the pages load faster? Also, the front end scripting you are using there is tripping a bunch of IE security settings. If you’re average user has standard security settings, they are going to get a bunch of annoying prompt message boxes.
The old site, while not pretty, was laser fast.
Something to think about…
Ditto on Faster Pages | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
The new site looks good but it is sooooooo slow. Even the daily newsletters are a pain to open and it’s taking forever to read an article.
Anybody working on this?
Joel Burslem | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
@ Faster and Ditto – Yup we’re definitely working on those issues. Hopefully we’ll have them resolved as soon as possible.