Have You Seen Our Website Yet?

Have you seen Interscape's website yet? Well, you should take a minute and check it out. We're using some really cool technologies to put out a simple yet effective website. Take the design for a second. You want to get a jump on MasterPages in ASP.NET 2.0? Then you should check out XHEO|Webskin. It's a very effective templating solution that allows me to now have to worry about mixing content and design, and it is very similar to MasterPages. I converted my entire site from Webskin to MasterPages in about 10 minutes. (Now if I only had a 2.0 GoLive license....)

Another cool thing we're doing comes from our innovative use of myKB. Did you know that our entire website comes from articles in a knowledge base? Scott Cate, leader of the Arizona .NET User's Group, built a rock-solid information repository, that allows me to syndicate all of our website content through RSS. That's how we make all those product information, news, and support feeds available. Because all the content is managed in our myKB knowledge base, it doesn't take any extra effort to make that content available to you.

Did you know that none of our web pages contain any static content? Every single web page pull content from the knowledge base, and formats it using a templated, provider-based feed control that we wrote, called SimpleFeeds.NET. This control will be available in the first part of 2004, but we're using it right now on the site to collect performance data. We want this control to be the fastest possible, and it will include extremely efficient caching techniques.

But one of my favorite parts of the site is the graphics in the corner. On most pages, that graphic comes from a control called RichContentRotator, from Cyberakt. As we come out with new products, we add the product to an XML definition file. Then, that product's logo gets randomly displayed on various pages of the site, thanks to RichContentRotator and the RandomSlide effect. We make heavy use of this in the Product and Partners sections (refresh the Partners page a few times to see it work)

A few more nifty things are coming. I'm going to be adding sample code to the Partners section of the site, to show specific examples of just how we use these cool .NET controls to make our user experience better. You see cool stuff on company websites all the time, but short of clicking “View Source” and ripping off the HTML, chances are it's not exactly clear how they do it.

If you thought I was tooting my own horn, you weren't reading closely enough. I mentioned this stuff because what we do wouldn't be possible without the hard work of Paul Alexander, Scott Cate, Miljan Bratecevic, and all the hard-working people at their respective companies. Just thought I'd take a second and point out how great they are, so that maybe the next time you need a solution, you'll give them your business.

5 Comments

  • Thanks Scott, I'll fix that right away.

  • Just FYI...



    Your RichContentRotator doesn't appear to render properly on Mozilla Firebird 0.6 or 0.7. Most of the bottom of the image is cut off.



    Also doesn't look right on Safari on my iBook. The same problem exists.



    The online demo of ScrollingGrid itself does render properly in the above mentioned browsers.

  • Hi Joseph,



    The ScrollingGrid works fine. It is the RichContentRotator that i was talking about. The images are cut off. It just looks like a positioning/layering problem. Probably the CSS that Robert is using.

  • Actually, it's the way RichContentRotator renders it's divs in the mode that we are using. I'm going to have Miljan over at Cyberakt take a look at it and see what's going on.



    The problem stems from the fact that, because of the random image effect, we don't know how large the image is going to be. That part of teh site's design is supposed to dynamically resize the gray area to fit the image. But in RCR, if the div renders without overflow information, it will not resize, and just cut part of the image off. They fixed that problem for IE, but they might not have properly addressed it in Firebird.

  • Looks good. One constructive criticism - my mind tends to look at the bar on the right as an "ad bar" - not suprising, since its topped by the ad rotator. Unfortunately it means I tend to ignore it, and this is particularly sad on your "Products" tab, where the bar on the right is the only way to actually see what the products are. I suggest either actually listing your products on the main page of the products tab, or put in big letters (with an arrow) - "See our fine array of products listed here on the right!"

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