Visit the full Birch Ridge Inn website at birchridge.com.

Over the last week, I have completed the system wide redesign of our inns website, birchridge.com. The prior site architecture was designed about 5 years ago, which in the world of the internet is about 2 lifetimes ago. While being very robust (I am a degreed software engineer after all), the design was showing its wear around the edges, especially as visitors to birchridge.com use more devices than just their personal computers to access the site. The new site is architected to take advantage of emerging HTML5 standards, and to be very adaptable to end user devices, be they smart phones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, or pc's. Bottom line, if a person is interested in discovering information about the Birch Ridge Inn, our web site needs to be able to adapt to their device, not the other way around.

In the intervening time since the last change in site architecture, web design practices have changed dramatically. In the old architecture, as in the architecture of this blog you are reading, much of the custom scripting I designed and implemented directly. Because of the widespread proliferation of devices and standards, I based the new architecture on a "Frameworks" to help isolate the software written for the site from the devices displaying the site. I did not make the leap all the way to using a standard "Content Management System" as I wanted to continue to maintain flexibility over the design. I did investigate a number of CMS's prior to starting the redesign effort. While I would seriously consider developing websites for clients using them, I found using a javascript frameworks was a better approach for this go around in the design.

Some of the new features of the site are interchangeable access between the full site and our mobile site, m.birchridge.com., direct access to this blog, and to our Facebook page. Custom drop down menus are carried over from the old architecture and supported on most pages. A "breadcrumb" feature, just above the drop down menus, was added to help guests navigate around the site. Custom photo galleries, like the photo gallery on the home page, can be supported throughout the site. I have also tried to make it easier for guests to check availability at the inn. After all, the purpose of the whole exercise was to help people book rooms and dinner at Birch Ridge, not just to make a pretty web site.

I have many more weeks of work on the site as we swing into fall foliage season and get ready for winter. But, even though today was a rain out in the morning in the mountains, we will also make sure that we get outside often for day hikes; and probably chase a little white ball down some fairways for a few more weeks while the weather permits.

Where ever you may be, keep it in the fairway, and don't forget your sun screen!