Case Study: Light Weight and Rapid Website Development with N2CMS Engine

Highlight of this case study

• 5 or 7 man-days for one site in general, including PSD file converting to HTML and CMS development.
• Most cost-effective website solution for small business

The client

The client is an Australia Network Service Company providing CMS Project Hosting service with N2 CMS.

What the client wanted

The client had been looking for a N2 CMS outsourcing service provider to implement different kinds of N2 CMS sites that had a complicated and delicate skin design.

Among several vendors, our pre-sales and estimation were outstanding and they finally chose us as the service provider.

Situation

The client has a development team of their own for skin design and N2 CMS development. As the client has too many projects to finish them all in time, we were asked to take the main development work so that their development team would be absorbed in the business logic among the web sites.

During the development, some of the skin designs were very difficult to implement, we frequently communicate with the client and gave better solutions for these difficult points, most of the suggestions were accepted. Besides, in order to make a better foregrounding effect, we did a lot of investigations on jQuery plugins, for some specific requirements, we even developed the plugins by ourselves. Among the 17 web sites that we finished, you can get a very cool visual effect and easy operation experience.

Project Screenshots

Solution

Technology Adopted

• C#
• N2CMS 2.0
• jQuery 1.3

Development methodology

To best collaborate with the client, we were asked to work with the skin development and N2CMS development.

At first, the client provided us with a PSD design file and a N2 development template. We created all the HTML pages per design and then sent them to the client for check before we start the CMS development. After the confirmation from the client, we started the CMS development immediately.

Sometimes, the skin implementation was difficult, we met several problems, e.g. the layout modification for gallery view images, the integration of gallery view and slider menu, etc. We did a lot of studies and investigations on jQuery Plugins, shared our experience of jQuery Plugins with each other on our internal meeting. Fortunately, we got over all the difficulties we met.

After a period, our workload increased, more projects were assigned to us, we became very busy with skin implement. For that, we studied out a workflow to speed up our productivity, we kept on accumulating experience of jQuery Plugins and sharing with each other, studying the best practice from the sample sites, more frequently communicate with the client. We also proposed our suggestions to facilitate the work and the client were happy to accept them whenever they believed they were useful and helpful.

Lately, we managed to finish all the 17 sites from the client, they were very satisfy with our service.