xdDesign Blogs

I was excited and pleased to see the handful of websites which we submitted to the DotNetNuke Open Force Community Choice Awards be selected as finalists in this online voting competition.

We entered a few websites in each of the categories, so to have most of them selected was quite exciting for us. XD Design work hard at making DNN not look like DNN and in many cases, have achieved it quite well.

If you would like to see the websites which made the final list, ready for public voting, then check them out here -

Category: Most Creative/Original Site
http://www.evolveone80.com.au

Category: Best Informational Site
http://www.oamps.com.au
http://www.dnnskins.com

Category: Best eCommerce Site
http://www.style.net.au
http://www.chalkartstudio.com

http://www.lightsounds.com

You can vote for them HERE

And of course, see the other entrants

A quick overview on each of these to help you understand what’s involved in creating these sites – most of them had very small budgets, the time frames were not that stringent, and in fact, I felt due to the designer requests on some of them, took way longer to deploy as we had to satisfy different people along the way who had little or no knowledge of the implications of their requests.So, what is the cost of a DotNetNuke website? It’s very subjective and topical and does depend on your infrastructure and customer requests.

Our typical client varies – some job we do are around 15 – 20k -they usually involve larger companies with lots of data that has to be converted, an element of custom programming, and extended time on data manipulation taking non dnn data either from an existing cms setup, which may not have worked for them, or static html sites that have literally hundreds of pages, hundreds of documents, all scattered / organised in a non methodical way. However, most of the DotNetNuke websites we create end up being between $3,500 > $7,000 by the time they are ready to go live. We are working on reducing costs further with our ready to deploy dnn builds that we have been working on that have already some of our DNN SECRETS applied. One of our biggest secrets is our relationship with a few quality resellers who give us hosting customers and in return, we give them incredible service, knowledge you simply can’t buy and experience that helps them make good money from DNN simply by association with XD Design to handle their websites hosting, email and management.

Having said that, we have found that many of the sites have not really been profitable – yes I admit, being pedantic about how they need to work, and working hard at making customers happy, as well as having to learn certain aspects of DNN has made some jobs what I call a ‘baptism of fire’. By that I mean, wow, I didn’t think that would be so hard!! But we have come an incredible long way now and thank those customers for the incredible opportunity to push DNN out of ‘our comfort zone’ and never say die until you’ve exhausted just about every single tool and resource we have access too. Fortunately that was way in the past but at the time, I still shudder at the impact of the ‘bleeding edge’ attitude I had and the scars from the damage occurred have faded, but there are times I look at some of my sites, and still have flashbacks that would be like a drug addict in rehab. … As Dr.Phil would say – “what was I thinking”. …. you get the idea I’m sure.

Moving right on now to the present…. What I am incredibly pleased about is our approach to using off the shelf modules where possible, leaving us an upgrade path for every single site we deploy. That is our space in business I’m comfortable to say. We do work with developers who are incredibly talented and take their websites to the next level, but for our own in house management, we prefer to work with a small handful of rock solid, reliable and trustworthy people / developers who we support, promote and help them make their products better.

I am incredibly proud of my clients – many of whom have been with me through good and not so good (ugly dnn days) and we have grown their websites from DNN 2 builds up, with some sites being successfully upgraded from to DNN 3, 4 & 5 and maintaining the integrity of site structure and management, and enjoying what the later versions of DNN and modules have to offer.

Sure we’ve had a few ‘oops, won’t do that again’ moments, but in general, in reflection, to look back and see where some of these sites began, and where we were at that point of delivering a DNN solution, it’s been incredibly satisfying to be able to offer such an amazing return on investment when you look at the initial cost of the site, the changes as it’s evolved, and how little their web presence has cost for what they can do with the website. Let’s see if the next few years does this. I also had to remember that we have done thousands of skins and hundreds and hundreds of DNN sites, for our own use and for others who deploy on their own servers, so that helps get things into perspective.

I’m not going to share the details of each site in great detail – not publicly, but I will give you an overview of how it’s been handled and why we took this approach. Currently, xd.com.au is being updated and *sigh* it’s decisions, decisions, decisions from both a marketing strategy, a logistical management strategy, through to the shift in the client inquiries we are getting. It seem just a few short years ago, where our business was purely referral from people we know, to becoming DNN evangalists, by accident I suppose, as I put lots of free information and downloads for a growing DNN audience when it was only new.

However, things have evolved, our business has changed significantly and our customer base is divided between more referral work, and more DNN support requests from resellers, developers and business owners who have seen the benefits of DNN but don’t have the skills we have of implementing DNN incredibly efficiently. We need to update our website to reflect this and like anything it’s a big job.

We are experts in the field of ‘off the shelf’ solutions because my personal philosophy is to empower people with technology and make their experience a good one, rather than many disasters and problems I end up being handed to fix where other companies don’t empower their customers but ’shackle’ them with inexperience, experimenting and taking advantage of open source technology in unethical and stupid ways. I don’t think DNN is any different to any other piece of software either, just in case you’re thinking that I’m knocking DotNetNuke because I’m not. And surely, after so many years here, and so many websites deployed, and plenty of support sites and still using it for our business should be an indication.

Now, back to the topic – The awards. Please each of the sites and then vote for them if you feel they are worthy. There is some good competition and I was very pleased to see other beautiful DotNetNuke sites as well. We are inredibly proud to have so many of our entries making to be finalists as there were plenty of entries and as I said, many of our clients have incredibly tight, small budgets and this is a reflection on what can be done with DNN without having to spend your children’s inheritence.

So, to follow through, on the next blog post, I have done the first one – most original – and will give you an overview of http://www.evolveone80.com.au so you can appreciate why it made it to the ‘most original’ category.

Cheers and thanks for taking the time to read… and another small piece of information – I am looking now at switching our blogs to wordpress – it has some appealing elements that I can’t seem to get past…I’m a sucker for bling!

Nina Meiers