Walter Johnson, hall of fame pitcher for the Washington
Senators in the 1920s, was asked the secret of his success. He responded simply “You can’t hit what
you can’t see.” Walter Johnson
worked to be one of the hardest throwing pitchers the game has ever known.

In the current web site redesign process, Walter Johnson’s
words are still true. It will be
easy to hit the visual elements of the redesign because we can see them. It will be easy to say “Yes, I love the
overlap of those images” or “No, I do not like that color pallet at all”. It will be easy to say “I love the
creative content on this page” or “No, that presentation of content is not
acceptable”. Those are sensory
elements that we see and react to with passion.

What we cannot see are those elements going into the redesign
behind the scenes. A completely
new architecture will replace one Apache web server with two new virtual
servers. It will replace a single
application server with four new virtual servers. It will provide load balancing between our servers to keep
any server from being overrun. It
will provide capacity to for using web tools such as streaming video and
Bethel’s own Bubblequest without disrupting our external web site.

Like Walter Johnson, it takes hard work to develop something
you cannot see. Bethel’s web site
redesign process is moving forward with a lot of hard work on the network team,
the systems administration team and the web services team. Network load balancing is in
place. New virtual servers are
handling the load. New front-end Apache servers are being designed and made ready for service. In other words there is a lot of hard
work going on where it cannot be seen to give Bethel a web presence that will
be robust and fault tolerant as well as attractive and compelling.