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Web Site Redo. Part 2
As I mentioned in an article from last weekend, I'm in the process of moving my company's web site from being FrontPage-based to a full-blown ASP.NET framework. Today, I thought I'd give you an update on my progress and discuss some of the more interesting aspects of the migration.
User Interface:
Overall, I'm still using the same exact interface for both the FrontPage and ASP.NET versions. However, for the .NET version, I thought I'd try and implement some of the newer technologies that allow me to provide a better user experience.
I'm sure by now that you've heard of AJAX and if you read much on this blog, you've seen me comment on Microsoft's AJAX framework called Atlas. I decided to utilize Atlas in as much of the site as is practical. If you've never seen what Atlas or AJAX can do for a web site, take a look:
Point your browser to the home page of the ASP.NET version of my site:
http://test.crmaccelerators.net. You should see something like this:
Once you are there, click on the About Us link at the top of the page. You should now see the following page:
Notice how the screen flashed as the new page was loaded?
Ok, now click Contact. Then click News.
Disregarding the lack of real content, did you notice you don't see that flash as the entire page reloads? That's because it isn't.
The Technology Behind The Page:
The page shown in the second figure is actually only a single page. I utilize a ASP.NET 2.0 component called a Multiview that allows me to create a single web control containing many child pages ( called a View ). When you click on the navigation links at the top of that page, I'm merely changing one View to another.
Additionally, I wrapped the entire page in the Atlas UpdatePanel component that is set to use Partial Updates. This means we are only going to be refreshing areas of the page that actually change, not the whole page.
Since we don't have that annoying page refresh flash each time the user navigates to new page, it makes for a better user experience. At least I think it does.
Caveats:
The Atlas framework is still a work in progress so you will, at times, run into issues. Wednesday night, I decided to upgrade to the latest versions of Atlas with the Atlas July CTP release and Release 60731 of the Atlas Control Toolkit. This promptly broke my site. Totally. It took me over an hour to figure out what the problem was and I had to download the latest non-production build of the Toolkit to make the issue go away. At least Microsoft decided to release the source code for the Toolkit so it makes it a easy process to complete.
ASP.NET 2.0 has Membership and Personalization functionality built into the system. I'm going to be using that with my new site to control access to various site sections and pages. Unfortunately, Atlas and the Membership controls don't play nicely together ( in the current version ) so work arounds needed to be created to make sure everything functioned.
Next Steps:
CRMAccelerators.net is hosted at GoDaddy.com which has presented a variety of issues related to the amount of control that I actually have on the site. I'll cover those issues in the next installment of this process.
We'll also discuss Membership and the hosted web site environment.
Development, Misc
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