andreasviklund.com

In my last post I promised an announcement, new templates and gave hints about changes coming up. I got many interesting responses to that, but as I said, it is nothing dramatic. Just a healthy dose of refreshments and some crazy new ideas. I can't tell you the whole story yet, because everything is linked into one big project where each part is depending on other parts to work. One of those parts (the Jokkmokk.biz server) needed a hardware upgrade after a power surge earlier this week, so everything got delayed for a few days. But I'm hoping to launch that site on Tuesday next week - and then move on from there.

But what is Jokkmokk.biz all about? If you have clicked the link you have seen that it is just a page with text in some strange language. It is Swedish, and what it says is that a new site will soon be launched on that address. The site will be the official website of the company I work for - a local computer company called "ITUS" which is located in my hometown Jokkmokk in northern Sweden. in other words, Jokkmokk.biz will be a site covering my professional design and commercial projects. I haven't written very much about the professional part of my work on this site since I want this site to be non-commercial and personal, so this will be a good solution.

But Jokkmokk.biz will be much more than that. It will also be a complete guide to my hometown. You will basically be able to visit Jokkmokk online, through images, videos, sounds and articles. It will also be a local news source and event guide for the people who live here. It will be a kind of daily updated magazine, with news, articles and other fun stuff. The site will be built on WordPress, so everything will be handled through the regular blog system. But one of the things I do for ITUS is to build customized and specialized themes for WordPress - so the site will not be any typical blog. It will be more portal-like. The site will be a nice demo of what WordPress can do - and what kind of custom sites I can build through ITUS.

I can't promise that it will be good, because the site has not been tested by anyone yet (hey, any betatesters out there?). But it will be a "proof of concept" in several ways. One of the interesting features is that the marketing budget is set to $0. We will not pay anything to promote the site. We (and with that I mean myself and my boss Karl-Johan) like to do things in strange ways - and with our SEO and marketing skills, a big reader base and the amazing original website content that Jokkmokk.biz will have (which includes completely free website templates and themes) we should be able to get a great start.

I have seen several local site launches lately, where companies and organizations have invested $10.000-$50.000 in enterprise-level content management system licences - and had expensive advertising agencies promote their site in order to give it good traffic. But despite these extreme numbers, none of the websites have validated in the W3 validator! That is not very professional. It is, in fact, really bad. I could make a huge list with features and details that you should expect (and even require!) if you pay a five-figure amount for a website, but I won't… I'll just wrap it up by saying that ITUS offers those features in all our packages. We build websites with world-class quality - at a really fair price level. Our cheapest package costs $0. Try to beat that! Ok, you won't get any site customization service, and you'll need to get your own hosting and add the content by yourself. But even for $0 the customer will still get a website that performs better (in the HTML/CSS validator, in browser compability tests, in accessibility tests, in speed tests and in several other ways) than most of the $10.000 website solutions that have been launched in northern Sweden over the last year!

But Jokkmokk.biz is just one of the links in the chain (or "one of the tags in the soup", really). There will be more crazy ideas, and one of those things include the phrase in the entry title: maintenance mode! The text screen that you see on Jokkmokk.biz is actually a temporary page that is displayed through a WordPress plugin called "Maintenance Mode". The plugin allows me to work on the site live - since logged in users can still see the site while everyone else will only see the "Maintenance mode" message. I have customized the plugin for Jokkmokk.biz - and I have also installed it on this site so I can play around with the theme files and try some new stuff without causing any trouble. So you you visit this site in the next couple of days and you get a message saying that no pages are available because the site is in "maintenance mode", it is because I'm playing around with the site. The maintenance breaks will not last very long, probably not more than 10-30 minutes. In worst case, maybe up to an hour. Then the site will be back - until the next maintenance break. I'll try to make these breaks on the "calm" part of the day.

And finally, for those of you who like to do detective work: The screen that you see on my Sandbox site is also "maintenance mode". I won't post the link to the sandbox here because it is not in any way a part of this site. It is my own theme testing place, and you should be able to guess the URL easily… I do need a few betatesters, but I will be very restrictive with the access. Anyone interested in joining the sandbox should contact me over MSN rather than e-mail since it appears as if e-mails bounce for some reason. Another problem to deal with, yes. And very soon I will start looking for sponsors. This will be a long weekend, and next week will be incredibly long…