Project Overview
InspirationGate, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner services company has been facing a number of marketing issues mainly in organizing the amount of technical and portfolio content it has built over the years, with its constantly expanding portfolio and multiple web presences on RentACoder, eLance, Microsoft Partner Directory and others. The company has been looking for a strong content management system to use as a base for managing all its marketing material.
As InspirationGate is focused on professional services, careful attention needs to be spent on the design, usability, functionality and look and feel of the site.
Challenges
- Build a creative and professional look for the site striking a balance between amount of content and readability.
- Use a strong extensible content management system as a base platform for the site.
- Easily manage and add new content through a workflow approval process.
- Carefully plan SEO, page indexing and marketing strategies by properly laying out site content, using strong analytics tool and properly using different marketing gateways.
- Cross browser support, we need to reach as much audience as possible and thus making sure the user’s experience runs smooth across different browsers and platforms is a primary challenge.
Provided Solution
InspirationGate has researched various content management systems, as a professional services company, our standards are pretty high, with extensive requirements including easily changing the look and feel of the site, adding new modules and controls, strong administration site, URL rewriting, caching, workflow for publishing content and case studies, user management and roles, we were amazed at how Telerik’s Sitefinity provides all of that and more out of the box.
With our heavy experience in .NET technologies and Sitefinity’s utilization of existing ASP.NET features as a base, it was very easy to get started with, yet one of its most powerful features was the strong administration section, we needed to add new administration pages, extend existing ones to fit our business needs, add new modules, change the rendering of existing modules and others, it was a breeze to cover all our requirements, thanks to the great effort spent in its design and architecture.
With Telerik’s powerful ASP.NET Ajax Suite available with Sitefinity, we were able to easily support various complex scenarios.
As technical geeks, we always look for rich APIs, we needed to support a number of scenarios that involved loading various case studies into a flash movie we built, the case studies were represented as blog posts after being extended to support additional attributes, we then added new admin pages that allowed the user to choose which case studies would show in the flash and finally expose the required info to the flash movie, this was accomplished by Sitefinity’s base UI framework for adding pages and its backend APIs for querying different kinds of business objects.
We also had a similar case when we were building the services menu slider which is a customly built jQuery slider for the company services.
It was also important for us to constantly publish new content with fresh case studies and new challenges we face every day, case studies are filled out by our technical leads and project manager which goes through an approval process by the leadership team before finally getting approval to appear online, with Sitefinity’s workflow and user management features, it was straight forward to meet our needs.
Sitefinity also provides a storage framework for different types of objects like text content, images, videos and others, and this allowed us to store all our content in a well structured environment.
The look and feel has been one of the most important aspects, we needed to design a unique layout for the site that from one side would shows our design and technical skills yet still easy to navigate through.
By combining all our graphics design, development engineers and technical writers and utilizing various technologies including Sitefinity, Telerik ASP.NET Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash, Google Analytics and 12 weeks worth of effort, we were able to achieve our goals.
Technologies
VisualStudio 2008, .NET 3.5, C#, Sitefinity V3.6