Microsoft SharePoint 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2.
This entire website is running on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. All of our pages and pop-ups are powered by SharePoint Lists which are used to store the content.
Why use SharePoint for a website?
SharePoint as a platform gives us the ability to quickly develop rich internet or intranet based websites that can be easily updated by just about anyone that can use an internet browser. Since SharePoint is built on top of the .NET Framework, we have also been able to leverage our existing skill-sets to build customized enhancements to serve our needs as you may have seen as you navigate through our website.
Why doesn't this website look like SharePoint?
Well, it can but this is so much cooler isn’t it? We started out building a custom master page for SharePoint 2010 which took out a lot of the standard out of the box SharePoint specific formatting, allowing us to concentrate on design and functionality.
How is the website content and design updated?
The design maximizes on the usage of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) throughout all of the pages. We use CSS to control the templates’ background images, fonts, colors, menu highlighting, and even color themes for the homepage and sub pages. We also use CSS to hide a lot of the unused SharePoint controls.
As far as the content goes, we can update the majority of the content through Picture Libraries and Lists. We really tried to stay away from Content Editor Web Parts, as the data in these cannot be easily accessed. With Lists and Libraries, we were able to utilize custom fields that give us the ability to control the behavior of content pop-ups, sorting, paging the data items (Next and Previous functionality), and the ability to easily swap out content with ease. This website can be completely updated with little work or design from a user. We eliminated the need for content authors to worry about the styling of their work by taking care of all the formatting with strictly defined CSS and other backend code. So all an author has to do is input their data and everything will be displayed correctly.
How long did it take to build this website?
The time spent to create this website was about 2 weeks, divided among two part time resources.
What SharePoint elements and web parts were used to compose each of the pages?