New Website Launched - v3!

Who would have believed that our first website - see image - (which was 100% Flash) was only developed three years ago (before smartphones and tablets made their debut - keep this in mind if you watch the demo). If you are on a desktop computer you can view it here along with our first 3D movie!

Version 1: Flash site

The intention of this site was mostly to test the business idea and get feedback. You can't just walk in to someone's office with no marketing collateral. Most people need to touch and feel something before you have any sort of credibility.

We made two versions of the site, English and French (and Arabic one too, but that didn't go very far, as Flash was ill-equipped at the time to display Right-to-Left complex scripts.

Version #2: Joomla

We then developed a Joomla!-based website to launch our technology. It was a painful experience as this CMS (Content Management System) really isn't up to any serious task (try launching an ecommerce or SEO-friendly site with it). But it was the CMS we knew how to use (dumb-user friendly) and we needed to launch fast (when you are a startup, you don't have time to make lengthy business cases and analysis).

That second version of our website allowed us to focus our efforts on the core of our technology, our intelligent client-server application, designing the server framework. If we had launched with a complex CMS right away, we could have been distracted from our core technical competency.

Version #3: Drupal

Finally, we are here! With a real CMS called drupal. This is the same system that powers the White House web site, the Ecomomist, and many of the top-tier news paper sites. And now it has a solid ecommerce solution to back it up. We tried counting on external help and ended up wasting time and money. A real company needs to have the expertise internal and to build the framework by itself to suit its needs. We have adopted a solid CSS framework (which we heavily customized), added our own customization to make it mobile-friendly (forward the user to the appropriate store app page based on the device they are using), and our own media management approach so we can deploy with a CDN (essentially a place to host all your media) in the cloud.

As well, we plan on making it a full-fledged learning-management system (LMS) so we are programming in our client-server framework which should be launched soon (which would be accessible from our SWF engine, as well as our mobile apps). All this to say, it's very exciting stuff! I hope it's the last major framework we have to build :) [note to self: we know better than to really believe this.]

Addendum: Why not Wordpress?

We got that question a few times, and here is our answer. Wordpress is a blogging site. It may have served us well for version 2, but is not serious enough in terms of framework and the number of available extensions or modules to make an enterprise-grade website. Many high-tech startups launch a Wordpress site with a theme they get for free (or pay for) to test their ideas and communicate with the world. But that's where the buck stops.

So, did we do a good job? Please drop us a line and tell us, we would love to hear from you.