The making of dataobjects.net website

At the beginning there was just a few pages on company’s website. The main task was to make a separate website for a product. Another task was to come closer to users and put all the material (documentation, forum, news, support and polls) in one place. As a result of several discussions we have adopted a new plan. The Bitbucket repository was created. Then we made several schemes to reveal overall structure of the forthcoming website.

Layout stage
In the next two weeks I created in Indesign several basic layouts for main page. Simultaneously I was working on adaptation of logotype for new website. Suddenly we got this layout. Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, then again Indesign… Here is the brief evolution of main page:

Evolution of the inner page and navigation:

Finally, we ended up with this and this.

Programming stage
I made HTML and CSS templates based on Indesign’s layouts. We attached them to ASP.NET website using masterpages and controls. Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, Tortoise hg, Firebug and many other tools were widely used. We deployed website on the hosting.

Testing stage
In next two months the website was actively tested. In this period we made many minor improvements. We reworked footer, added facebook button, news feeds and many more.

Addons stage
Next I made a skin for documentation microsite. We utilized our own Help Server for this task.

We decided to use OSQA for support section. Previously used annoying phpbb-based forum was swept out. I made a custom Stackoverflow-like theme. I also had to make a custom theme for our blog.

I created several banners for Adwords campaign, a splash image for installer, a row of icons for IDE integration tool and other small things. I had to improve Google Analytics’ tracker in order to track visitors over multiple domains.

Stats
There are 161 revisions and 42 MB of files in repository. Folder properties on my machine (without repo):

Good work!