Mike DeTuncq, President
Our sponsor and sister site, Hit! Run! Score!, has come a long way from a husband and wife team selling sporting goods from their Loft. Today, they proudly announce a new site design. To mark the happy occasion we’ve asked Mike DeTuncq, President and Founder to write a few words. This is what he had to say:
Dear Hit Run Score Customer,
I’m proud to announce that we’ve just published the latest version of our web site. The new site is the most significant overhaul to hitrunscore.com since April 2000 when we came online for the first time. This is not a cosmetic change, but a complete rebuilding from the ground up.
We started on this project in August 2008, and we had the basic layout and functionality done by the end of the year. It took from January until May to get the details worked out regarding the finalizing of menu navigation, site design, etc. We started converting pages on our test site near the end of May and finished 3 months later in late July. It takes a long time to change 9500 web pages!
We spent the past week doing a final inspection and clean up of all the little problems we identified. Late yesterday afternoon, our test site was copied to the live site. The finishing touches were put on this morning and the new hitrunscore.com went live about 12:20pm CDT.
With any significant software development projects there are always things that are missed no matter how much testing you do. Fortunately, we didn’t have to restore the old site because the new one blew up. The problems we found after going live were pretty minor and not too bad as these things go.
There is a lot of new functionality.
New Menu System: The fly out left menus that were the same on every page have been replaced by top menu links to the sport home pages and left menu navigation that is unique to each page on the site. We’ve always put a lot of effort into making it easy to find things on hitrunscore.com, but this is even better.
Find Products Faster: We’ve also made it so that you get to products faster. In the past, there were some product pages that took as many as eight clicks to get to. Most products can be navigated to in four clicks. The QuickView button allows then allows you to look at the product page without having to actually load the page. This makes it a lot faster and easier to look at multiple products before you make your final selection. You can even place an item in the shopping cart from the QuickView screen.
Find Exactly What You’re Looking For: We’ve also added filtering to the left menu of section pages to allow you to narrow the products that are displayed. Some of the filters load another page, but some, like the price filter don’t require a page to be loaded and work very quickly. In the near future, we plan to add even more filtering to show the products you want even faster. One of the things we really wanted to add was sorting by price. Hopefully, we’ll be able to add that functionality soon as well.
I’m proud to say that all of the work on this site was done in house by HRS employees. It was a long process, but in the end, I’m very pleased with the results. However, you are the ultimate judge of how well we’ve done. I’d love to hear your comments.
- Mike DeTuncq, President
