Launched new website - www.uecc.com

New uecc.com

1st of February 2012 we launched a new website for United European Car Carriers, www.uecc.com. 

The new website was designed to provide an enhanced viewing experience and easy access to updated key information about UECC – the company, our services and our fleet. The website has focused on clean and concise information, a fresh look-and-feel and easy navigation. 

Old uecc.com

I joined the company 1st of November 2011, and one of my tasks were to establish a new Internet site. We started the project in December, with a small team - working part time on this project. The intention was to have to new site launched by 1st of February 2012.

The old site was about 5-6 years; using flash, presenting content different in different browsers, hard to update for non technical (actually for IT Pro or developers as well)

Alternatives for new site
As technical architect (as well as project leader) for the project I looked into some alternatives for technical product to use. In the beginning of my career I worked as developer on different technologies (C, C++, C#, Java, Pascal, Delphi,Visual Basic, Perl, etc...) before I started as a technical architect focusing on the Microsoft platform - specializing the Enterprise Collaboration and Portals.

Before I started to evaluate the different alternatives, I was more or less decided on using Microsoft SharePoint 2010 - but needed to do some research before taking the final decision.

My initial research ended up with the following alternatives:

• Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• EPiServer
• DotNetNuke
• Umbraco
• WordPress

Based on the criteria give by our steering committee we ended up with choosing DotNetNuke. DotNetNuke is based on a Microsoft platform, have a community edition (for free) and also a standard and enterprise edition.

Project

To help us with the graphical layout and implementing this in DotNetNuke we choose a quite small local consulting company. They prepared some initial thoughts for the home page and sub pages for our first meeting, which we were very happy with. The end result is actually very similar to the initial design.

We were a small team working on this - and only had the opportunity to work on this part time, since we have a lot of other tasks and projects that we are involved in.

Launched

The last two weeks before the launch was a little bit more hectic than normal days, but still we had good control on both the content and technical.

The night before 1st of February we launched the site. The only unexpected, which I fixed immediately with installation a http direct module in IIS and add some .html pages, was that old links (Google, Favorites) were pointing to a virtual directory that didn't exist anymore (so some 404 pages)

Conclusion

After two days in production, using Google Analytics (great tool) to monitor the traffic, everything seems to works well. A lot of very positive feedback from employees and externals. 

In addition to Googly Analytics, we also use DNN Monitor, and it reports 100% uptime.