How we did it: SendTec.com - design, development, and go-live in just 6 weeks!
I've received several inquiries about the SendTec website that was mentioned in a recent blog entry, so I'm very pleased to post the following "how we did it" guest blog entry written by Ted Vreeland (Application Architect) and Dave Redman (Managing Sr. Software Engineer), who were the Technical Leads for the project.
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SendTec, Inc. is a multi-channel marketing company deploying traditional agency resources as well as innovative technology solutions for the benefit of ROI-minded advertisers. As part of an overall corporate rebranding effort, SendTec wanted to redesign the look and feel of their corporate website. The overall goals for the new site were:
- To have a clean, modern look and feel.
- To maintain existing search engine rankings.
- To be easily managed by non-IT personnel.
- To be completed quickly to meet the aggressive brand launch schedule.
The SendTec Business Technology Team had very limited experience with SharePoint technologies. A key decision needed to be made whether to build the new site with ASP.NET (which had been used to build the existing site) or with MOSS 2007. Two members of the Business Technology team quickly ramped up on MOSS 2007 with an emphasis on the Web Content Management (WCM) capabilities, customizing MOSS sites, developing custom web parts, and content deployment. The decision was made to move forward with building the new site with MOSS 2007, but there were some design features in the new site that would prove to be significant challenges for the Business Technology team.
Design. The design of the new site was done by SendTec’s in-house creative team. To achieve the look and feel as laid out by the designers, the project team needed to create a new master page; custom content types; several new page templates; and define many new custom CSS styles.
Navigation. The new site included three-tiered navigation. At first glance, it appeared that MOSS only supported two tiers. After some digging under the covers, it was discovered that MOSS did provide the underlying functionality to support more than two-tiered navigation by using a custom administrative tool to manage the additional level. In addition, the design called for the top menu bars to appear on the left-hand side of the pages. This was achieved by creating a custom menu control that inherited from the standard ASP.NET 2.0 menu control along with the use of the CSS Control Adapter Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0.
Search Engine Rankings & SEO. The new site had to maintain its existing search engine rankings and needed to provide SEO support by way of keywords and description “meta” tags. To support the first part of this challenge, the Business Technology team created a custom ASP.NET module to handle stripping out the “/pages” portion of the in-bound URL as well as removing it from the HTML being returned to the browser. In addition, a redirect handler was employed to ensure that pages that no longer existed in the old site were routed to the appropriate page in the new site. To support the SEO requirement, the default Page content type within MOSS was extended with custom column types that allow copywriters to modify the keywords and description of a page themselves. The site’s Master Page was modified to include these values in the header section of the output HTML.
Content Management. Several areas of the new site were to be managed by copywriters, designers, and content managers. To achieve this, the WCM features within MOSS were enabled within an intranet version of the site. In addition, several lists were created to allow content managers the ability to quickly add new press releases, articles, white papers, and job postings. To support design requirements, custom web parts were created to query the lists and format the output. Incremental content deployment jobs are used to periodically push new and updated content to the Internet-facing MOSS farm.
Performance. MOSS 2007 provided performance well beyond our expectations right out of the box. Server load and response times were significantly better than our old site. However, we felt that we could improve site performance even more, so we implemented the built-in caching capabilities of MOSS that are well documented here. The first part of the implementation was using the BLOB caching. This reduced the amount of database overhead since there was no need to retrieve content from the database each time an image, document, or any other infrequently changing item was requested. The second part of the implementation was the use of profile output caching. Since our site is primarily visited by anonymous users, we decided to enable the “Public Internet (Purely Anonymous)” cache profile with no changes to the default settings. The implementation of BLOB caching and cache profiles immediately cut our response times in half. Our final step to improve performance was to reduce our page size. The biggest reduction of page size was to eliminate the need to have the 257KB core.js in our pages for anonymous users. So we implemented a simple custom control to remove the core.js script from the HTML output for non-authenticated users.
The SendTec.com website was launched on April 24, 2007. Shortly after going live, the project team made some modifications to the HTTP modules to improve security. The content managers and designers have been utilizing the WCM features of MOSS, and they really like being able to make site changes without the need to involve the Business Technology Team. The SendTec management team is very pleased with the decision to implement the new site using MOSS 2007, and in fact, is planning on utilizing MOSS for future client websites. This would give clients the best of both worlds – having SendTec provide the creative and technical expertise to design, build, and host their site, but still give clients the ability to add or modify content as they wish.
Ted Vreeland
Application Architect, MCD
tvreeland@sendtec.com
Dave Redman
Managing Sr. Software Engineer, MCAD
dredman@sendtec.com
