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The State of macromedia.com
On the one hand, it's a deep, well-visited site—in
fact, it's one of the most-visited sites on
the web. It reaches a million customers a day,
providing fantastic reach for the Macromedia
brand. The online store keeps growing as a direct
sales channel for our products. The download
system is hugely popular with customers, who
do 250,000 software downloads per day and 4
million Macromedia Player downloads per day.
Our community applications, the Exchanges and
Forums, serve an active and growing community
of Macromedia customers and fans. And the site
has global presence; it's published in 12 languages.
On the other hand, the site is showing its age.
The user experience needs work. Customers are
trying to use content and services across the
two partially merged sites and it's not seamless.
They're complaining about the quality of search
results. Applications have been introduced piecemeal,
so the navigation and interactivity aren't consistent.
Legacy applications are difficult and expensive
to change; they're straining under the pent-up
demand for new features, and they're hard to
deliver internationally without a lot of extra
work. And Macromedia—like every other enterprise—wants
better payback on our investment in web and enterprise
applications infrastructure.
Sound familiar? If you've got anything to do
with a big, complex website, it probably does.
Clearly, the site needs a complete overhaul.
Meanwhile, Back on the Web
The web has evolved. "Brochureware" sites with
lots of content but little functionality have
given way to sites where visitors can use web
applications to conduct actual business. The
number of web applications has exploded. But
there's a hitch. The applications are difficult
and expensive to build and the user experience,
based on the HTML page model, leaves a lot to
be desired.
Macromedia believes there's a better way—a new
imperative to make the web work. We believe that
great experiences build great businesses. For
us that means making a great experience for customers,
designers and developers, and business leaders.
By joining Allaire and Macromedia, we bring
together priceless assets to enable the next
generation of websites: Macromedia Flash Player,
the most ubiquitous software on the web; the
ColdFusion scripting environment, which thousands
of companies use to build web applications more
easily; and development tools like Dreamweaver
that don't get in your way but take the pain
out of developing websites and applications.
The vision is tremendously compelling. Looking
at our customers' work—such as the now-classic Broadmoor
site—we start to see a "working web" take
shape. It's not just visually stunning, it's
also increasing reservations for Broadmoor by
making web transactions faster and easier. We
think of this new class of web application as
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Wouldn't it
be great to work this magic on macromedia.com—not
just for a single application but on an enterprise
scale?
We've seen the product plans. We know that some
of the tools we want to use won't be available
until we launch our next generation of products
in early 2002. And before we can even get started,
we need to retool the web team.
How Deep Do You Go?
Nobody undertakes a site overhaul lightly, particularly
if it's not your first one! If your site's
been around for a while, you've got fragile
spots you'd rather not touch—junk drawers you'd
rather not open. But at this point everything
is on the table.
As we sort through all the ideas we have for
improving the site, we keep a few guiding principles
in mind:
- Help customers by enhancing their skills,
knowledge, and probability of success online.
- Unite our constituencies into a connected
and compelling relationship with our products,
our company, our partners, our industry, and
each other.
- Achieve cost efficiencies in our web infrastructure.
- Demonstrate the effective use of our tools,
servers, and players on the site.
It's exciting to plan what we'll do. When all
the analyzing, estimating, and prioritizing are
over, we set three major objectives for ourselves.
Build a Great Experience
We want to apply our new mantra—"Great
experiences build great businesses."—to
our own site by improving the design, navigation,
content, and applications.
- Change the look and feel of the site, simplify
the home page, add new content areas to serve
our changing business, and modify the global
navigation to make it easier for you to get
information and services faster, and replace
the search engine.
- Rebuild the major customer applications using
Macromedia Flash MX, ColdFusion MX, and JRun.
Change them from old-paradigm HTML front ends
into RIAs. This includes the online store,
trial downloads, and global product registration,
membership, exchanges, and forums.
Impact the Bottom
Line
As a site visitor you won't notice our infrastructure
changes, even though in some ways they're just
as important as what we're doing to the user
interface and applications. Here's how we're
cleaning up our infrastructure act to make it
easier and cheaper to maintain:
- Standards. All macromedia.com
applications will run on a Java2 Enterprise
Edition (J2EE) foundation. This means that
we can take advantage of the huge range of
Java-based APIs to extend the site over time,
and integrate other systems into macromedia.com.
Because the architecture is XML Web Services
ready, we can expose most of our back-end systems
as SOAP web services so we can integrate with
partner sites and applications.
- Back-end integration middleware. Our
web applications used to be integrated directly
with back-end systems, so if the back end changed,
the web applications did too. So we're isolating
the front-end customer applications and back-end
systems by putting a Java and XML-based message
hub between them. The message hub is completely
based on industry standards—including Java,
JMS and XML—and it uses message-oriented middleware
for transaction integrity and reliability.
- Multi-tier architecture. Following
current web best practices for enterprise websites,
we're using a multi-tier architecture across
our applications. Besides using the message
hub for back-end integration, we're separating
the presentation, business logic, and data
layers in the web applications so we can isolate
changes to each layer.
- Internationalization. We're
committed to building systems that are Unicode-aware;
we’ve pushed Macromedia Flash and ColdFusion
harder on these fronts than most customers
would. Our applications are designed to be
multi-lingual on a common code base, and they
adhere to current best practices for internationalization,
including separation of strings, locale-specific
formatting behaviors, and so on. This allows
us to bring localized applications to market
more quickly and save localization costs.
Eat Our Own Dog Food
As part of the rebuild project, we've become
our own most demanding customer. Because we're
rebuilding a whole suite of integrated enterprise
applications using Macromedia products, we're
pushing our products further than ever before.
We started using the Macromedia MX family of
products long before they reached beta. Being
such early adopters is a mixed blessing: As the
product features gel and stabilize, we're involved
so early in the process that we actually get
to influence how the products take shape. We
meet with the product teams to give them feedback;
we enter bugs directly into their bug databases;
and if our favorite bugs and features don't seem
to be getting enough attention, we can pay the
teams an encouraging personal visit.
Fast-Forward to March 2003
The development is finished, the testing is over,
and we're launching. Did we meet the objectives
that we committed ourselves to a year ago?
We think we did. But the real test is ahead
of us. We think that our new website beta—its
architecture, user interface, and applications—is
a new experience for macromedia.com and a true
example of what
you can do with Macromedia products.
Of course, it's not really our opinion that
matters; it's yours. Please let us know what
you think. And accept our challenge to create
new experiences of your own. Go ahead—amaze us.
You always do.
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