It’s been a long time coming. After over a year of research, development, sweat and tears the new site at trainsignal.com is live. This site is much different from the previous site that existed on Monster Commerce. With the completion of the Train Signal website I had a moment to spare and refocus on gary.eimerman.com a little and hence the new theme.
MC was a good choice for our shopping cart 3 years ago, but with the growth that we’ve experienced and customization that desire at Train Signal combine with the poor support and treatment we received from Network Solutions (bought Monster Commerce while we were on the platform) it was time for a change. A great deal has changed with the site…where to start???
The biggest change was our platform. We’ve moved from MC to AbleCommerce e-commerce platform. We also have a fully dedicated server which we have full control over and can customize for anything we plan on for the future. Customization was a big feature we looked at when we were shopping around for platforms. We don’t sell 1000s of products so we don’t require a cookie cutter store with the ability to quickly deploy 100s of products – which I might note that Able does do very well. Instead we needed a platform we could mold to fit our newly designed sales pages. This is where the new platform really sets itself apart from many of the others we looked at. While sitting on top of Able we’ve been able to code our pages to look unlike the majority e-stores out there.
There are many other changes on the site including the unveiling of our new inclusion of Transcender Quiz Applications with our training and a new and improved training lineup which now includes Windows Server 2008 training courses and newly organized Windows Server 2003/2000 training. This site will be treated differently than our site has ever been treated in the past. It is an living organism that will continue to grow and improve. I look forward to working with our customers and training audience to deliver the best computer training site available.
Now onto gary.eimerman.com – as you’ve probably noticed, I flipped over to a new theme. The old one was too dark and cluttered. I still need to do some improvements to this theme, but I’m already a fan of it…What do you think? If anyone wants to design a new header for the site I’d be more than happy to promote your services or barter with you for some network administration, computer consulting work. Art has never been my forte. I hope that I improved the usability of the site as well. The embedded wmv files are gone and have been replaced with a Silverlight based media player that should prevent the videos from automatically loading no matter what browser you’re using. I’ve noticed a couple of times where the pages have displayed funky or the videos wouldn’t necessarily display correctly. If you are consistently having this issue please let me know it’s not just a fluke and I’ll see what improvements I can make.
Overall, just keep your eyes open for ever improvements on both this site and www.trainsignal.com and give me feedback.
