New eChef Site is Live

My excuse for not blogging or generally producing any other content for the last couple months has been that I was busy working on a project for eChef. And so I am incredibly relieved to finally announce its completion.

Behold echefsoftware.com, the new home of eChef online! This new site is almost a complete rewrite. Neither Megan nor I were ever totally satisfied with the first one: it was too static and was designed in a way that was not at all conducive to being extended. We were running separate web apps for the store and the news blog, and the download link had to be manually updated every time we released a new version. Overall it just wasn’t the caliber of experience you’d expect from a company that makes software.

Most of my favorite new features sit on the admin side that I can’t really show off, but I will point out a couple of things.

• Snazzy new logo!
• The screenshot previews on the organize, compose, view, and print pages use a modified version of FancyZoom to do that cool inline viewing thing (we made it somewhat more compatible with old versions of IE and more screenshot-friendly).
• We use sIFR to get that custom font in all the main page headers.
• The store is actually just an updated version of the one we had embedded in the old site back in July.
• All the pages have validation links, because I made sure everything was valid XHTML from the get-go this time around.
• Everything is running together as a single Rails app!

So go have a look around and tell me what you think!