For more months than I care to mention, we've been doing phased development of the Orbit/FR website. Orbit/FR wanted a tailor-made Content Management System (CMS) that met their specific needs and requirements. Some of these requirements came from issues from the previous website: all data was kept in a single, flat, database table with no backups and no front-end management tool, so only their web admin could fix anything; there were no formal or standard templates, so even when things looked similar they had slight differences which gave the company a bad image; and the markup of the old site was terribly malformed; everything hinged off of one page -- index.asp -- that served up pages by a PageID through the querystring, so things weren't very optimized for search engines. Other requirements came from meetings prior to launch: the need for a backend administration system to manage all aspects of the site, from meta data to images to sales representatives to contact information.
In the end, we did everything we could on our end to keep costs down for Orbit. We made sure to plan each section and feature out ahead of time to make sure that we didn't have to go back and recode anything. We also made sure that we took advantage of third-party tools and new .NET features wherever we could -- specifically, LINQ, Telerik RAD Controls, jQuery, Master Pages to drive the three or four distinct templates in the site, SiteMapDataProvider to manage breadcrumbs, sitemaps and navigation, and google custom search API to use google's search engine power for a seemlessly integrated site search. Mix all of those in with some good coding practices and polymorphism, and some solid custom-built User and Server Controls, and what we ended up with was a solid, structured, ASPX-based CMS that allowed even non-technical people to administer and update (and protect via VSS).
So what took so long for the new website? The number of hours spent building the system weren't all that high -- probably only one to two months worth of hours if you stack them together. The problem we had was getting content together. The system was built, but no one had good content to put in it! So after months of struggling to scrape content together to make it a full-featured launch, we finally got all the data imported into the system and pushed the site out the door last week.
Graphics were done in part by a third-party contractor and by Orbit/FR's new parent company, Satimo. The new site features a new logo and color scheme which aligns with Satimo's corporate branding.
The site was done in semantic markup with tableless design and styled completely by CSS. Some light javascript and jquery and it uses graceful degradation for users who do not have javascript enabled.
The website isn't 100% complete. Just phase 1 has been completed. Orbit has plans for the site, but that probably won't come at least until 2009. There are bigger things to take care of for now!
That's all for now.
Cheers
-eli