We've rolled out a new website composed of DotNetNuke, Flash and a simple clean design.
Before we began designing this website, it became apparent that we, the developers, had the same goal, to have an attractive, highly functional, user-friendly, professional website. ... a website with as much functionality as form. ...one with underlying complexity while remaining simple on the surface.
Beneath the Surface
We were so impressed with the DotNetNuke sites that we've deployed for our clients, that we decided to create one for ourselves. We decided to go with DotNetNuke for many reasons:
* It is built upon the Microsoft .NET Foundation. Because we are all Microsoft professionals are Code Authority, we naturally enjoy any chance to develop with .NET.
* We support the open source community. We think that sharing code and ideas creates a more informed, efficient, and accelerated IT development community.
* Deploying a content management website has never been so easy. The core features of DNN already handle memberships, roles and security groups, file transfer, content editing, etc... The amount of coding to create our site was dramatically reduced and we were able to have our site deployed very quickly.
* We wanted to have blogs on our new site, so that we could contribute to the open source community. With a DNN website, we were able to add this functionality very easily.
On the Surface
In keeping with our desire to create a simple, clean website, we chose this sharp html design that you see. The design has clean edges, minimal colors, and a few cool images. It is just enough to make an interesting impression without taking away from the focus of the website, the business of software development. We did not want this website to be just another cluttered website with colors and objects all over the page. There are a few animations on the site, but overall, we tried to not make the website overly "flashy". ;)
The Flash objects, referenced from within the DotNetNuke skin, are each auto-activated via javascript to avoid the IE security popup message reading "Click to activate and use this control". This message can become quite annoying to users, so we found a way around it. Just another way to provide a better user-experience.
In the end, we believe that we've achieved our goal. We hope that you find this website to be easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to see who we are.