Starting in Q3 of 2009, ThePort Engineering began an extensive retrofit of our entire site with a new User Interface. This new UI went hand-in-hand with a new templating system that we had been building (more to come on that in a future blog entry). The goals of our new UI were the following:

• Speed it up: We wanted our pages to pop! when you hit them
• Upgrade to our new templating system. As mentioned above, we've begun the conversion away from our old proprietary system to a new, open, standards based system. We're taking advantage of the power of XML and XSLT to really transform and empower our web designers with cool new toys
• And most importantly, we wanted to make engagement much easier

The last point is absolutely the most important. The goal of our platform is to make it easy for people to engage one another and talk about what really matters to them. In our old user interface, engagement wasn't the focus. Commenting on someone's profile, interacting with a group, or creating new events took too many steps. Our new UI streamlines these processes considerably while still elevating relevant content to the end user.

Several new modules have helped accomplish this: a new community activities module that shows activities across the community, what are my friends doing (which will be available Q1 2010) shows what your friends are up to, and our feed aggregator module helps deliver news and RSS feeds that matter to users and groups.

The UI project will continue into 2010 and will continue with an overhaul of our groups and blogs technologies. Beyond groups and blogs, UI and a better customer interaction will continue to be a focal point for our team.