LevelTen Re-Launches Corporate Website, This Time Without Drupal
Taking a cue from Phase2 Technology’s decision to move their corporate website from Drupal to Wordpress, LevelTen Interactive is preparing a new company site utilizing a full suite of non-Drupal technologies. “This is an exciting time for LevelTen, we have really pulled out all the stops”, says founder Tom McCracken, apparently making some sort of pipe organ reference.
Our customers expect us to not only be following the latest web development trends and technologies, but to be leading from the front as well. With the addition of both “Design” and “Code” tabs in the latest Microsoft FrontPage, our developers have virtually unlimited control on where to place all the blinking, multi-colored text and IFrames on client sites. “FrontPage lets me use ALL the font families I’ve collected over the years on my ZIP disks, which means there is no limit to the variety of fonts I can simultaneously use on your web page” exclaimed themer Mark Carver, while playing with a stack of AOL CDs on his desk.
Graphic designer Gretchen Voelker relied on cutting edge tools to create the overall theme of the website. “The new Microsoft Paint beta just added 64 color support, which I was able to fully utilize for our modern design. If that is,“ she laughed, “you have the hardware to support it. You really need a VGA board and 14” VGA color monitor to fully appreciate the two shades of blue I’ve used throughout.”
Back-end server performance is critical to handle the high volume of page views LevelTen receives every day, so we spared no expense on the hardware. “It wasn’t cheap, or easy to come by, but adding the x287 floating point co-processing board to the server was an easy decision” said lead developer Randall Knutson. “Now there is almost no limit to the number of digits of pi we can calculate when serving up web pages. I assume that sort of thing happens a lot.”
Using president David Hahn’s contacts from when he worked at Novell in the 40's, we were able to get the latest NNDF stack (NetWare, Netscape WebServer, DB2, Fortran77) installed and tweaked on our server. “We loaded up every socket on the memory expansion board with DRAM chips until we had a full 32Kb ready to cache those web pages” said LevelTen backing developer and lead guitarist Ian Whitcomb. “Unless someone picks up the other phone extension in the break room and knocks you off our website, you are going to enjoy a magical web experience.” And Ian very seldom uses the word “magical”.
LevelTen is excited about our latest corporate website, but don’t worry - we have no plans to abandon Drupal web development or the community. We don’t like to think of ourselves as just a “Drupal Shop”, or a “VisiCalc Shop”, but a company that uses the best tool for the job. Anywhere on the BITNET.
