The Careful Upgrade

This weekend marks the beginning of a major backend upgrade at Versatables.com that has been in development for more then 4 months. It is a major one and hopefully the last of it’s kind, I want to take a more Apple approach to updates, do them often and do less. What are some of the things that will be changing over the next month?

A completely new backend database, rewrote from scratch, why is this important? A year ago when I originally designed the original database the needs were different it was strictly a shopping system and quite honestly it had been 4 years since I had worked heavily in database design so I just didn’t do a few things as well as I should. The backend has started to really fold over the last few months because of the extensive modifications we have made to the original shopping system, it now is a shopping, quoting, shipping, note, email system. To say it has been heavily hacked is an understatement. So that is the biggest and most important improvement because without that nothing else really matters. Results? 200% improvement in query speed which of course increases the front end speeds as well.

This is not say there is nothing for the end user….

We have also rewrote EVERY page on the site to be 100% css / html valid code.. yes it is transitionally valid.. maybe next time it will be strict. So that was a very large job especially considering the number of pages (500). While I was making the site better I also decided to try and improve the page structure in terms of making the page flow better for both search engines and text readers.

There was one more huge change that we made… we decided to add sub domains for images, scripts and styles, this effectively boosted the pipes our website could load from 2 (default) to 8. This really comes shinning through on image heavy pages.. we feel it is an important change for the future. The reason this works is because a browser can load information two pipes on each domain and a subdomain counts as a new domain. Nifty huh? Result? Generally about a 33% increase in browsing speed for our customers Today is just the first day of upgrades… (well it actually started yesterday with me working with the Rackspace Technicians to get the subdomains setup perfect on our production server.

Today I will be updating all non-product pages with the new css valid code. Enjoy.