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DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards

XD Design Most Informative Website Finalist  – Oamps Insurance

This website was a pleasure to do. Most sites are, but this website in particular gave us the opportunity to work with a developer company who were still learning the ins and outs of building out a dnn portal. This particular project was created and built on the XD hosting environment, and then packaged for deployment on the developers staging server, and then to the live location where it currently resides and, is actively updated.

The purpose of this project was to provide a company the ability to self manage their sites and manage the many clubs and associations they support, and DotNetNuke with it’s incredibly robust portal replication, was the perfect choice. As I observe the progess of this company and how they have encompassed all the power DNN has to offer, I can’t help but be impressed. As you can see, either by these screen shots or visiting this site, they have maintained an element of the ‘global look and feel’ of their child sites, but given each a unique and tailored look. We setup a primary portal which contains all the day to day company information they require, but being active and supportive in many sporting associations throughout Australia,

This was one of few sites I’ve worked on where we were able to have complete say over the structure and implementation and our advice, after consultation and questions were taken on board, so that now, after handover, the site is update by their staff and remains elegant and consistent throughout. I have seen a couple of small glitches now and again, but they are quickly rectified once the site administrators have simply gone back and looked at the original setup to follow.

That’s what I love about DotNetNuke. It’s much more forgiving and flexible than people realise and XD Design offer very structured and tailored support on our projects, so, when we have a specific style or method of use of a particular module, we’re able to advise clients on how to manage it in relation to their site. By that I mean, adding images to DotNetNuke, sometimes we have specific classes assigned to them to allow them to be displayed in a specific way that meets the marketing team’s demands, but have to advise the web adminstrators on the techniques we have setup for them so they can comfortably update their website without the need to call us each time. There are quirks that are not always related to DNN in how imformation is displayed

So simply by providing this company with a professional tailored setup, the reseller was able to provide an incredibly slick solution. They used our expertiese and judgement on how best to deploy the project and the end result is a stunning solution that allows many sporting associations the ability to be represented online wherebye the have an overview of the type of insurance offered in relation to that particular association, the logo of the association to allow familiarity when a person visits that website, including primary contacts, phone numbers, claim forms and an overview of services / insurance that affects the particular association represented on that portal. A link to the club’s website is also provide, so with the logo, link and images of the sport/association, it gives further assurance and confidence to the site visitor they are in the right place.

All of this was made possible by XD Design providing the advice and portal build that would allow for consistent delivery of information, structured branding and look and feel, ease of maintenance and management, and, efficiency. At XD Design, we run lean and green installs and we have NEVER had an instance where our clients have complained about speed. We squeeze every bit of bloat and unrequired ‘stuff’ from the site to make the whole team love working on their websites. So if you’re DotNetNuke website is running slow, then perhaps you need to visit us..

Some of the modules we used were, once again, our favourite Ventrian News Articles module, html, a custom employment module, customised Inventua menu and of course the Snapsis CSS Menu, all of these module developers still supporting the DotNetNuke community with commercial products that make it possible for people like myself, who are not developers, to build great solutions.

At the completion of the job, we packaged the whole portal and database up, where the developers were simply able to attach and deploy a live site with very little handling on their side and we do many projects like this because we are setup and geared to handle DNN in the most efficient manner and turn solutions around quickly and we know when we deliver, the sites work, without error, and therefore it leaves the end user (client) with very little requirements to actually get the site to go live. And when there has been an issue, the deployment, go live date for the project is not hindered by unforseen technical issues as there have been several occasions where we have hosted the live sites until technical problems are resolved. This is another part of the incredible service and value for money we give clients and with XD Design, the problems stop here. We are known for solving problems, not being the cause of them.

So, here you have another insight to how we handle DotNetNuke and the end results and why our websites are Finalist worthy!! Please vote for us if you think this website really does meet your expections of what a good information site is about.

Nina Meiers
http://www.xd.com.au