Fovia.com Website Launched With Stunning Images
Jan 23rd, 2017
I’m delighted to announce the launching of the new Fovia Inc. website. Fovia Inc. provides software development kits and related services for high-quality, high-speed 3D image rendering. The kind of image data that’s output by MRI, CT and industrial scanning machines.
What makes this website so fascinating (and exciting to work on) are thousands of high resolution medical, archeological and industrial images showcasing the power and flexibility of Fovia’s XStream® HDVR® product. If that’s not enough to perk your interest, check out the high resolution, fly-through movies.
I had the pleasure of working directly with their VP Global Marketing & Strategic Alliances, Shay Kilby, to complete a WordPress site. The new website was created to replace Fovia’s previous website.
The FoviaTest project
When I took my first deep look into the in-process website installed on FoviaTest.com last March, I saw a good design with a few months of work left to do. Designing the architecture of the site and producing the content for the pages would be done by Shay’s team. Making it all work on smartphone, tablets and desktops was mine.
I was hired to help complete the site after a company that Fovia originally hired did a sub-par job. Shay came to me because “as a technology company, a low-tech, sloppy site is unacceptable, we want someone with a higher standard to complete the job.”
The coding that the former website company left behind, to be polite, was a mess. It looked like it was done by programmers who knew enough PHP to be dangerous but not enough WordPress to follow standard practice. The website was bloated with extra, plugins and single-purpose template files making it difficult to sort out what sliders, carousels and other widgets worked where. None of the code was responsive.
Fovia’s limited timeframe pushed the option of starting over off the table. I worked with the existing template, functions and stylesheets, simplifying the design and restructuring the front page for easier editing. Shay and her team quickly picked up the essentials of WordPress administration and content production.
Launching the new Fovia.Com
All the work was done on a development site and URL. While it’s better to have a separate environment for development work, moving a WordPress install to another host and URL invariably bring unexpected problems. Here, the FTP program on the development server had a limit of 10,000 entries in any operation. The new website, however, had over 13,000 files in the media library making it impossible to download.
My usual solution for such problems would be to logon to shell sessions on the two servers and transfer the files in batches. However, getting shell access to both servers would be logistically difficult so Shay had her team use WordPress’ Media Manager to delete unused and duplicate images and movies. It was a lot of work but they got the number of media files below 10,000 and we launched the new version on schedule.
Please take a look at the Fovia website and let me know what you think (and remember that I’m not responsible for the design.) If you have any questions about the technology I used or the development strategy I pursued, please use the comment form below or email me directly.
