[webarch-websites] Soft launch of new Webarchitects website

[Jonathan]

Yeah sure it sounds all right to me.

I've got an Autumn Mailout in mind and this would make the basis of an 
article, among others : major update of our website and offerings ...

Thanks for summing it all up Chris

Cheers
Jonathan


On 07/02/16 13:01, Chris Croome wrote:
> Hi
>
> We have had a couple of external reasons to launch a new
> site for Webarchitects:
>
> 1. Nominet compliance, we agreed the text here with
>    Nominet at the end of last year and really needed to make
>    it live then:
>
>    - https://www.webarchitects.co.uk/domain-renewal
>
> 2. HTTPS certificate expiry -- all the commercial certs
>    expired on Saturday 6th 2016 and to save a fair amount of
>    money we wanted to switch to Let's Encrypt certs.
>
> So due to the above we launched the new site on Friday:
>
> - https://www.webarchitects.co.uk/
>
> Some pages still need more work on the content and I hit
> the Let's Encrypt beta limit of 5 certs per TLD per week
> before I got all the domain names right, so for the moment
> there is an issues if the site is accessed without a www,
> but this should be resolveable next week.
>
> I had to get a new commercial cert for
> https://stats.webarch.net/ (some work is needed on the
> Apache config to get the logo working).
>
> The Ecohost site was also replaced with the Webarchitects
> site, but set to have a different front page:
>
> - https://ecohost.coop/
>
> And the plan, for after half term, is to probably do the
> same for Ecodissident.
>
> We have updated all the packages and prices on the site
> but haven't quite got a new shared hosting server ready to
> host anyone wanting to a new site, but hopefully I'll get
> the last few issues resolved in the next week. The old
> prices have been archived here:
>
> - https://docs.webarch.net/wiki/Packages_2012-2015
>
> The plan is to have the AGM before we ask anyone using any
> existing services to pay for things based on the new
> prices.
>
> So, the launch was a "soft launch",
>
> - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_launch
>
> because of the issues above, but after half term, when we
> have the next AGM date set, we should post of lists and
> Twitter etc to announce the new site / prices etc.
>
> Hope all the above is OK with people -- myself, Adam and
> Jonathan have been working on this site for several months
> and as people know we have been meaning to launch a new
> site with new prices (we lose money on everything, apart
> from hourly work, with the old prices) for several years
> and it is good to finally have it out there, though we are
> not quite ready to shout about it yet...
>
> Please feel free to post any feedback to this list.
>
> All the best
>
> Chris
>