The joy of having a site go live.

After a 12 hour debug session last Friday, a new site I’ve been working on finally went live.

Working in-house on web projects mostly means I am fixing sites that are already online. Although I often build entirely new sections and features for the site, I rarely get the satisfaction of launching an entirely new site.

I’d almost forgotten how it felt.

Especially considering the short amount of time this site took to get going (compared to my last site which took a year and a half). Although, I have my coworker to thank for that as he took the lead on the more difficult aspects of this new site.

Ecom sites aren’t the coolest projects to work on, but this one was pretty fun, particularly the image zoom feature for individual products. For example, check out this Eagle Scout coin. You can still get the traditional “show larger image” experience by clicking the thumbnails, but if you simply mouse over the main product image you are treated to a much smoother experience.

I don’t know if I could have made this post unless the site had already made a sale so I wasn’t expecting to have the chance until later this week. However, thanks to the miracle of Adwords I had an ad running in about five minutes on Friday night and arrived to work this morning to see the first sale had already been made and shipped.

It’s a good day. :)