GCX Corporation

The second redesign in a year for a progressive client with a website that is heavily used for marketing.

When GCX contacted us they were in an interesting predicament.  Their web contractor had completely stopped communicating with them about 50% of the way through a site redesign. They hadn’t heard from him in weeks and they were left with a half-completed project and no web-savvy employees on staff to evaluate where they were.

After completing a week-long audit of the GCX web project, we provided them a detailed report of the project’s status from a developer’s point of view.  We also included a proposal to finish their website and get it out to the public.

Our evaluation of the website wasn’t pretty.  The previous developer had built much of the site’s front and back end, and it looked fine to the GCX team, but behind the scenes was a tangle of duplicate files and code written like it was 1998.  We taught some very important lessons to GCX upon delivering that audit:

• Even though the site was being built to look exactly as the designers had intended, the techniques used to code the site were very old.  Web standards were completely ignored and the content was laid out using HTML tables, an old school technique that has been frowned upon by professionals for years.


• If the site had been completed and launched, GCX and its visitors would likely be happy with the end result. However, behind the scenes, the loading of duplicate files would cause an extra load on the server, slowing down the page load times.  Add the extra weight of the endless code on each page, and load times would slow down even further.


• Search engines would also have a heck of a time weeding through all that code to find the content they were supposed to index so that web searchers could find GCX easily.

The inexperienced programmer had set up GCX for failure, and GCX didn’t even know it.  Along with explaining these issues to them, we rebuilt a single page of their new site using up to date techniques and web standards.  We then printed the code along with the previous developer’s code and showed it to them.  Our three pages were well-structured, easy to read and follow, and very light weight in comparison to the 14 pages of tangled spaghetti that they would have made public had their original developer never left.

Both GCX and Web Inception have agreed that losing contact with him was the best thing that could have happened.