Website Redesigned

2026-01-22

We've finally redesigned our website.

We've been using a CMS package for a long time—10 years, come to think of it. It was finally time to rebuild everything from scratch.

Why Now?

Keeping Hadatai prices down while stubbornly maintaining MADE IN JAPAN quality takes tremendous effort. We need computers to handle as much administrative work as possible, otherwise we can't manage the incredibly detailed order specifications from our many customers. Hiring more people means higher costs, which leads to higher prices for customers. But we can't just raise prices willy-nilly. We have to balance everything down to the last yen... Honestly, I'm SO jealous of countries with fixed exchange rates!!!

Sorry, got a bit carried away there.

Anyway, I'd been putting it off thinking "I really should do this," but with the mask production finished, I could finally get started.

Development Scale

Migrating over 1,000 images in a month... I honestly wondered "Will this ever end?" while working on it.

Why We Stopped Using a CMS

First, let me say this: among all CMSs, I most recommend baserCMS.

The reason is simple. Extremely few security vulnerabilities discovered. And even those are limited to the admin panel—I've never seen a vulnerability that allows direct attacks on the website itself. If security is your priority, it's definitely the top choice.

If your website is a standalone system, I still recommend it.

So why did we stop using it?

Integration with our core server, database connectivity, customer information delivery—our company's unique and detailed requirements kept growing, and eventually the CMS framework just couldn't handle them anymore.

After 10 years of use, all the "I wish I could do this" and "I want to add that" piled up, and CMS limitations became a bottleneck.

What Kind of Migration?

We considered various designs, but ultimately decided on static HTML pages. Only the dynamic parts run as CGI.

Say what you will, this style is the most secure. We write draft pages quickly in Markdown internally, then convert them to HTML with our custom build tools.

Not having to worry about "plugin vulnerabilities" or "PHP version issues" is great for peace of mind.

The Hardest Part... Full Custom

The hardest part of the migration was definitely the Full Custom order form.

The sheer number of fields is staggering.

Having to show different fields depending on the language—even though it's the same form—made my head spin during implementation.

10+ Custom-Built Tools

The build tools we ended up creating. Each has slightly different specifications, so we shared common parts while writing individual processing in each tool.

Finally Released

And so, we finally made it to release.

We plan to continue updating the website content going forward. If you find anything "hard to see" or "confusing," please don't hesitate to let us know.

If you find any bugs or issues, we'd appreciate you telling us.

This was a one-month rush job, but actually this is just the starting line. Now that we can do things that system limitations prevented before, we want to make the site even easier to understand and more convenient for our customers.