When I joined Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC) two years ago, I compiled a list of projects that I wanted to tackle. One of the items was to update our Enterprise HDD website. The objective was to create a website that would tell our story and how our products can help push businesses forward to achieve their goals. The refreshed site would also need to serve as a more engaging tool that provides information and resources to customers interested in learning more about Toshiba Enterprise HDDs.
To redesign and launch an improved webpage, a lot of time, effort, and resources are spent on the front end customer facing design. This phase may take months or even years to complete, due to the complexity of creating the right balance of functionality and User Experience (UX). Once the design has been finalized, it can finally go into development, where developers code the backbone of the webpage architecture.
At TAEC, our philosophy is to look for a better way. When Toshiba launches a new Enterprise Class HDD, our engineers build upon the knowledge and technology that helped develop the prior products. Toshiba engineers recently researched and developed new component technologies, which resulted in the higher areal densities and storage capacities found in our newest 18TB Nearline HDD. Our engineers worked, developed, and incorporated a new technology, FC-MAMR (Flux-Control Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording), to increase our Nearline HDD capacity to 18TB.
As I embarked on redesigning the site with our internal team members, I was reminded of those efficiencies realized by our Engineering team when they so often build upon a solid foundation, succeeding, in essence, by not reinventing the wheel.
Although our current website was highly functional, it lacked the color, excitement, and innovation of the TAEC brand. However, it does contain all of the essential content that still needs to be conveyed in the redesigned website. I quickly realized that a substantial amount of time, money, and resources could be saved if I could utilize the content and foundation of the existing website to build the new one.
I also realized that further efficiencies could be gained if I can somehow eliminate the time-consuming front end design phase. So, I began my search within TAEC for a viable website design that could serve as a “template” for the new Enterprise HDD website. During my investigation, I heard that our own Client HDD group recently redesigned and launched their new site.
By marrying a pre-existing design, that has already been designed, vetted, and approved, with content and foundation of our existing website, I was able to launch our redesigned Enterprise HDD site in half the time it would traditionally take at a quarter of the cost.
Redesigning the Enterprise HDD website was a great learning experience for me. Although I led the launch our new and improved site, this project would not have been accomplished so seamlessly without all the prior work done by the other teams. I grateful for how our engineers are constantly developing next-generation products, and to learn from their process. With a solid foundation to build upon, sometimes we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but merely take what is there and improve it.
Visit our new Enterprise HDD webpage at https://storage.toshiba.com/enterprise-hdd