Monday, July 09, 2007

Wild Bill Guarnere.com

Client: Wild Bill Guarnere
Work Performed: Website, Forum Community, E-Commerce/Transactional

William “Wild Bill” Guarnere is my grandfather.  While he’s therefore not a “client,” he certainly did have some ideas about what he wanted on his website.  The idea was to try and create a community where people could learn more about the war and those who participated in it.  Of course, there was a lot of content on my grandfather’s own unit, the 101st Airborne Division, 506th P.I.R., “Easy” Company.  It absolutely had to be that way.

My father and I decided that a “museum” feel was no good.  After Band of Brothers came out, everyone wanted to know these men, which we thought was great.  To achieve that end, I developed a website that featured a forum community as the nerve center.  When we launched on April 1, 2002, the wheels came off in the form of thousands upon thousands of visitors.  Today, the site has over 4000 registered members and close to 200,000 posts.  The site also features a small little store where we sell swag to pay for the bandwidth associated with such a highly traveled site (we’re on a dedicated server over here...).

The newest redesign is a table-less layout that was built using web standards.  The forum solution is driven by the fine folks over at Invision Power, who have been good to us for many years!  The site is static, and does not have an underlying framework driving the main content areas.

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