Supporting Multiple Web Sites
By Peter Varhol
Miller Freeman, publisher of Web Techniques, is a major publisher of dozens of trade magazines, as well as a producer of conferences and trade shows. In addition to a corporate Web site, Miller Freeman supports sites for a growing number of its publications and conferences. Each site is designed and developed entirely within its own group. They leverage the corporation's Internet and Web resources while making independent decisions about site design, content, and style.
Recently, I spoke with Jay Schaefer, the man in charge of the services and technical support for the Web sites of all the company's publications and conference productions.
Jay, how many Web sites do you provide services for?
Right now, we have 120 sites, of which 75 are "live" at this time. The rest are in varying stages of development, and will go online at some point in the future. These include the Miller Freeman corporate site, the individual sites of the Miller Freeman magazines, and specific conference and trade-show sites. For each, we support both a production site, which is the one seen by visitors, and a test site, which internal Web developers can use to examine changes before going into production.
Our visitor traffic is over one million files per week, and like most sites, this figure has been growing rapidly. This translates into about fifty thousand visitors per week. While this may not sound like a great deal compared to some of the major sites, remember that this traffic is spread out over more than 70 sites, most of which are very different from one another.<>
