Setting up consultancy Craze with his brother-in-law provided Adam
Reynolds with the opportunity to put development ideas into
action
Setting up consultancy Craze with his brother-in-law provided
Adam Reynolds with the opportunity to put development ideas into
action, writes Martin Couzins.
One such project was the Web stie www.extremesports.co.uk, which
was set up in the spring of last year to sell videos of - you
guessed it - daring activities.
"I and my brother-in-law Luke Craze, who came up with the
original concept for the site, set up extremesports. He provided
the direction for the site and I provided the implementation and
also fleshed out some of the concepts," says Reynolds.
Customer interaction determined his approach to developing the
site. The site contained a lot of static information which,
Reynolds says, needed to be made more dynamic to attract visitors.
"To enable a Web site to become dynamic, I felt it needed a
database back-end. I also wanted to use an object-oriented approach
to development. I chose Allaire Coldfusion, which sat well with my
OO experience."
It took three months to get the concepts right, but to rework
the site into one driven by Coldfusion took just two weeks.
Reynolds points out that development of the site is ongoing. The
current raft of changes includes membership areas, reviews and
sport zones with an emphasis on remote administration of the
site.
The site runs on NT servers based in the US - which, Reynolds
says, provides cheaper hosting - with an upgrade to SQL server in
place.
To build the site Reynolds used a combination of skills
including Allaire CFStudio 4.5, Macromedia Dreamweaver and
Fireworks. NetObjects Fusion was also used to provide a rapid
prototyping interface.
With about 10,000 hits a month, Reynolds says the main challenge
is getting visitors to return. "The major issue is to make the site
"sticky'" by providing content that keeps people coming back. It
really needs a team of sports enthusiasts to give it the content
that we just don't have the time to provide. This naturally
requires investment," he says.
Reynolds is mostly providing site administration to shift the
focus from tech-head (himself) to content provider (his
brother-in-law). "Content provision is best done by a nutter who
goes surfing in the middle of winter," Reynolds concludes.
Curriculum Vitae
Name: Adam Reynolds
Age: 29
Qualifications: BSc in Computer Science
IT skills: Coldfusion, Javascript, HTML, Oracle, Ingres,
Openroad, C, Ada
Hobbies: Games playing
Favourite book: The Magician by Raymond E Feist
Favourite pub: The Who'da Thought It, Glastonbury
Reynolds on Reynolds: workaholic, optimist, jovial