Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a web design firm and my own marketing people to change our web environment. It’s been no casual decision. HMS Software has one of the oldest web environments in the world. We first started the site in the late 1980s when websites were just new to allowing graphics images. Our first version had about 7 images including the logo and a half dozen menu buttons. We were about the 7000th entry in the then-pre-eminent Yahoo index. That may not seem like much but at one time Yahoo was adding about 16,000 business entries a day. We talk about our web environment because it’s more than a website. It’s a collection of websites, domains and web services .
In today’s modern age, an organization’s web presence is critical to its public image and HMS Software’s web environment has changed many times over the years. 
Now, with more and more people visiting the blog.timecontrol.com site from tablets, smartphones and different sized screens on their PCs, we have to update the look and feel to be more modern. Moreover, we have numerous domains that made perfect sense at the time but have since become more consolidated in the way we talk about them publicly so we will take this opportunity to have our public image reflect the reality that we speak every day.
So later this quarter, the current website look and feel on the top image on the right, is about to become a lot more like the look and feel of the image below it. And, we’ll be consolidating the 5 domains we’ve been using to a much more manageable 3: timecontrol.com for all things TimeControl, industrial.timecontrol.com for all thing TimeControl Industrial and hms.ca for anything more general about HMS Software.
We’re doing a lot of work in the marketing department to make sure we don’t lose any content during the change and we’ll be doing a large number of “re-directs” for pages that have names that have moved.
It’s an exciting project for what we see as exciting times.
