Tourism

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.

Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

Backups are the safety net and an absolute requirement. But the next most important part is doing what you can to stay out of trouble. We've all become accustomed to security updates on our computers. Today every operating system has an update system, and a huge number of attacks are on vulnerabilities that have fixes released but people have neglected to apply.

How would losing your web site affect your business?

That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

Freelock were very helpful and supportive in helping me realize my vision for a website. They have deep technical expertise, and are capable of delivering on advanced features and functionality. They also have a genuine, longer-term commitment to making your website a success, and are always on-hand to provide great suggestions.

Freelock was approached to build a website focused on the “Top 50” Day Trips from Seattle, based on rankings and reviews from users. Cooldaytrips.com includes a description of each destination, photos, driving distances, accommodation, restaurants and activities. For those wishing to stay longer than a day, the site also includes recommendations on Extended Trips.  It’s an extremely useful resource for those planning a trip in the the Pacific Northwest and Washington State.

As the coordinator for the Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission, I direct staff and contractors in projects for the OPTC, including the contractor selection, design and build of the new website. Freelock was chosen and did the work as expected with great results. I heartily recommend them for other work of this nature. Their customer service and personal approach sets them apart from the crowd.

Planning a vacation is tough. Between the pain of finding a hotel or final destination, booking an airline, and locating information on things to do, one could spend days online surfing from website to website searching for items that may or may not be correct and/or relevant.

Isn't a vacation supposed to relaxing? Shouldn't planning and booking a vacation be as relaxing? 

I think so.

The Olympic Peninsula Tourism Board came to us in early 2009 to assist them in developing a visually stunning and highly functional website in a Content Management System. The site needed to be flexible enough to be managed by the 12 partners of the OPTC represented by local Chamber of Commerces. This meant the system needed to not only be able of handling complex permissions, but also easy to use and train new members. That being said, we recommended the use Drupal because of it highly flexible theme capabilities and content management superiority over platforms such as Joomla. 

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?

Quite simply, Rails is something you build an application in. Drupal is an application. So chances are you're one major step closer to building a web site that does what you want it to do, if you start with Drupal.