unhatched's posterous

Breaking up is harrrrrrrrrrrrrrd tooooooooooooo doooooooooooooooooooo! La la la laaaaaaaaaaaaa

This past week was breakup week. The week we talked with some of our current vendors and let them know they would soon no longer be receiving money from our fine association. There was a lot of hesitancy about who should let them know, how it should be addressed - Phone? E-mail? Hand written sonnets? Tear stained 'Dear John' letter?

We've delayed these inevitable conversations for as long as possible, but now that the finish line is in sight, it can no longer be ignored.

Our current web vendor pretty much controls our virtual livelihood (something I've never understood). They control our DNS settings, domain renewals, CSS. . .just about everything. Despite my requests over the past 2.5 years, they've never given me access to these things either (except for the few times I figured out their admin passwords, blocked them out and made some pretty handy improvements).

We had some pretty laughable but legitimate fears when we sent over the official notice we would not longer need their services in the coming months. They included:

• Deleting all our files stored in the back-end of our current CMS before we had a chance to do some data migration.
• Ignoring any tech problems
• Creation of any tech problems that would need the aforementioned support
• Failure to provide all renewal documentation

Luckily, our fears were just that: fears (so far). No major issues have arised that weren't fixed in a timely manner.

So where do we stand as of right now? We have a dev site up and running while final design tweaks are made. The CMS will be handed over this week and hopefully the eCommunity will be done by the end of the week. Training will consume my life for a couple days, and then the ball will be in our court to make sure we're ready for an October 22 soft launch. I've never been so stressed or excited for a project.

The next post on this topic will be the grand finale: the unveiling!