Welcome to the new Dahon website!

Welcome to a brand new year and a brand new Dahon website!

About a week ago, we went live with a new site. This year, instead of just updating information about our new folding bicycles and accessories, we performed a complete overhaul of our site. The Dahon website on the surface may look and function the same as before but underneath it is an entirely new infrastructure and code base.

For the past six months, our team has worked hard to migrate our lovingly hand-coded site to a new content management system (CMS) powered by Drupal, an open-source CMS. We worked closely with Zivtech, a brilliant team of Drupal experts from Philly. (If anyone out there is looking to build a website, I cannot say enough wonderful things about Drupal and Zivtech.)

This new system allows us to easily manage our website and open it up to a large group of contributors. It also permits us to show customized product mixes for each country. Our new web platform will also be able to scale and grow with our needs as we introduce new and exciting functions to the website in the future.

For the current version of the website, we wanted to keep all new changes simple. We wanted to migrate to the new system while retaining the same look and feel of the old site to cause as little disruption to our users. Everything takes time, but we feel that we are taking a big leap forward in a positive direction.

Of course, there have been some improvements and changes to the site. The biggest change, other than information about our 2010 product line, has been the Switch Countries pull-down menu near the bottom of the page. This function will direct users to the appropriate content for their country.

What’s next, you may ask?

Oh, believe me. We have a lot of ideas. As a sneak peek, here’s what we are thinking …

• Migrate the forum to the new system.
• Provide a place to find information about our older bicycles.
• New look and feel.
• Social networking.
• and many, many more things to come.

I want to thank our very enthusiastic and vibrant Dahon community for their support in helping get the new site up and running. We have received some very good feedback regarding the new site already and I want to let everyone know that we are taking your suggestions into consideration and we have already started working on some issues. We are constantly monitoring our site and hopefully you guys will be happy with the new changes.

Happy riding and best wishes to everyone!

Terry