I am proud to say that the design and development of the current HiQnet website is 100% my doing. I've been working the HiQnet guys for about 6 years now, doing print advertisements, branding work, trade show graphics, promotional brochures and such, so we know each other pretty well. This is actually the second or third revision of their site that I have built for them, and while I used to manually manage the content on their site for years, this time I've built an advanced Content Management System into the site.

The CMS / Administrative Tools for this site are powered by the same "Darth Validator 4" engine that I originally developed while working on the TASCAM project, but I had the foresight to write the tool to be as generic/reusable as possible. All sites that I build to use the DV4 tools eventually benefit from the requests of other clients, as each time I go back to add a new feature to one site, I copy the latest version of DV4 to that project and work from there.

Things that are true about this project

• This is a project that I manage on an on-going basis, periodically making changes to the site's architecture and adding new features.
• The HiQnet guys are really cool, and I enjoy working with them.
• This site features a Darth Validator 4 powered Content Management System.
• It also features a user account signup/creation system to allow users to sign up, then log in and download System Architect.
• The user account system also stores the user's preferences on email updates, and there is a tool for the admins to get only the current list of subscribers when they send out emails notifying their user base about updates to System Architect.
• I liked working on this project a whole lot. I'm quite happy that the client approved my first mockup as the design direction they wanted for the site.
• But I liked the site a lot more before it launched, when I still had a Cat and a picture of Rainbow Space on the homepage as dummy content.
• I suppose that this was a bit of a slip-up on my part, but because of issues caused by the client's internal firewall, I had to put the alpha version of the site up on a server that wasn't behind any password protection in order for the client to preview it and provide me with feedback. Since I had done this in a pinch, and as quickly as possible because the client needed to see the work -yesterday-, I didn't have the time to put up any thing to prevent the site from being indexed by search engines. As a result, a Google Image Search for this brand resulted in the Cat as one of the first results. This only lasted for a week, but thankfully the client took this well, as news that the new version of the site was even better at drawing the attention of the search engines, and would continue to do so once it was launched.

Things that are NOT true about this project

• The client's internal SMTP sever caused no problems at all, and delivered every single email, to every kind of email address without fail.
• As a result of the above non-issue, I did -not- have to use the open source PHPMailer class to connect to an external SMTP server in order to send mail from this website.