The Challenge

Netspectrum is a successful web design and development company based in Munich, Germany. From the very modest beginning, they have grown into a respected name and have completed a number of projects for large international clients.

While the scope of their projects and the number of clients grew over the years, their website had become outdated literally years ago and did not reflect the current position and skill-level of the company anymore.
“While our clients’ projects are always implemented using current, cutting-edge technologies, our own site was still running on the same code-base it had when we originally launched it”, says Hardy Erlinger, the company’s owner and a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET since 2006, “… and that meant ASP.NET 1.1 without Master Pages and a complicated home-grown localization solution which worked alright at the time but had turned into a maintenance nightmare over the years”.

Because the company was constantly involved in project work, necessary updates to the site were no longer occurring as they would be too time-consuming. “The need for a new site had become evident and we knew we would have to have a CMS system in place to make updates as straightforward as possible, otherwise they simply wouldn’t be occurring because of our constant strive to meet tough deadlines”, Hardy recalls.
In addition to enabling quick updates, the CMS system should allow the team to leverage their existing ASP.NET skills when developing the new site and it should support standards-based development with a strict separation of content and design. Since some of Netspectrum’s clients come from abroad, the need for easy localization of the content from their native German into English was also high on the feature wish list.
As Hardy recounts: “Over the years we looked at a number of CMS systems and while we honestly tried to make them work – in one case even with three different releases of the product – the results were always disappointing for various reasons. And with none of them we managed to even get beyond the initial evaluation phase. The systems were either too hard to install and get running or used a proprietary template system that required lots of reading before getting productive or they produced bloated HTML that didn’t pass our team’s quality standards.”

Netspectrum had been working with Telerik’s ASP.NET controls for a number of years and used them pretty much everywhere they could to enhance the user experience and ease site development. Anikó Erlinger, the company’s designer, comments “One of the main reason we have always preferred Telerik’s controls over the products of the competition was their support for standards-based development. Since Sitefinity was created by Telerik we decided to give their CMS a closer look – and we haven’t looked back since.”

The Solution

Based on the positive experience with Sitefinity during a client project, it was an easy decision for the Netspectrum team to implement the relaunch of their site using Telerik’s CMS solution. They were quickly able to integrate their favorite CSS solution, the popular YAML-framework (www.yaml.de) into Sitefinity’s templates and used it to create three different themes that could easily be applied to certain sections of the site to visually differentiate them from others.

“Global CSS styles ensure a consistent look of the site and where Sitefinity’s built-in control-templates were not satisfactory, it was easy to customize them to our needs” says Anikó about the design experience.
To facilitate a quick release of the site, it was decided to have German-only content for version 1 but provisions were made to accommodate an English version in the future. This was a painless process and, using Sitefinity’s powerful workflow features, translation work can continue during the team’s spare time and be released with a simple click on the “Publish” button once it will be completed.

The site is deployed on Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7. “Using the powerful URL-rewrite-features of IIS 7, we were able to catch legacy links from our previous site and direct visitors and search engines to the new content seamlessly. Sitefinity, ASP.NET and IIS 7 are a true dream team”, summarizes Hardy.

The Results
 
After a surprisingly simple development process, Netspectrum’s old site and the headaches it has caused for its owners are now history. In its place is a custom site built on Sitefinity that is standards-based, produces valid HTML and makes use of well-known ASP.NET features like Master Pages and Themes. For the initial release, the site’s content is in German only, but over time it will be translated to English using Sitefinity’s intuitive localization features.

Updating the site’s content is now easier than ever. As Hardy puts it: “The content authoring editor allows me to focus exclusively on what I want to write without being distracted by – or even having to think about – the code of the page I’m editing. This allows me to produce better content and even has me looking for new things to put onto the site, simply because it’s fun.”

Another surprisingly positive result of switching to Sitefinity was the site’s performance. Using a combination of Sitefinity- and IIS-7-features, the site turned out to be much more responsive than the team had originally expected. This screenshot from Google’s webmaster tools shows that the site’s response times have decreased to less than half of what they used to be.

Additionally, several visitors volunteered comments on the snappy performance of the site shortly after the launch.

Based on the positive experiences during a client project and their own site relaunch, Netspectrum has decided to base all future CMS-related work on Sitefinity. And as it turns out, there has been no shortage of client requests since.