It was built using nopCommerce as a seperate application. Using nopCommerce was entirely easy.

It included a server move the previous month to a new host. I also took the opportunity to update the Hatfield code to .Net 4.0 and started to organize and simplyfiy the code. Using PetaPoco and Linq, so much code dispapears.

Using Umbraco 4.7 was a real joy; all the changes they made: being able to use Razor syntax in templates and for macros instead of XSLT

The three things I liked

1. Source controlled external project for user controls, POCOs and admin pages.
2. Integrating seperate admins into the Umbraco dashboard.
3. Using a combination of Umbraco pages, Razor and url rewrite for the products.

The site is combination of web forms and Razor macros

Something that didn’t make it into the final site (but still exists) is a sales rep location admin and output.

As much as possible is editable through Umbraco:

• Every page has a selectable background image.
• Every slide on the homepage is a Umbraco document, making selecting images, setting text and ordering easy for the user (rather than editing an XML file).
• While trying to keep the site as simple as possible.

One last touch was putting all the CSS and JavaScript on a subdomain and merging and compressing

I didn’t make this website, I just did some basic maintenance, creating and styling the Wufoo forms, setting up the hosting and some email accounts. Easy peasy.

The only functionality on the page is a simple JavaScript image slider, made with the very easy to use Slides plugin for jQuery.

The last challenge was figuring out to set the page options to display the app as the default view, and then learning that it only works for non-fans, fans see the wall.

Standard Facebook contest app. Like the page to see the entry form and submit it with JavaScript to a PHP page and save the entry to a database.

Only thing I did different this time was to use PHP’s alternative syntax for controlling which blocks of HTML are rendered. Very clean and simple.

So a email was needed and it had to link to a coupon and I thought of three ways of dealing with it:

1. Use a static coupon link that just runs out after x number and hope people don’t print more than one (assuming that is the way the coupon provider works).
2. Use a static link to a page on your server where you generate a unique coupon link for each visitor and redirect them to that URL (and set a cookie so if they come back they don’t get a new one).
3. Pre-generate all the coupon links and hope that the mass email sender allows you to customize each email, like addressing each email to their name.

Turns out the mass email service did support email customization as just another column in a Excel file. So I wrote a simple C# console application that read from the database and updated each row and copied the rows into Excel. Great!

I had to add additional entries to the XML file and generate a new output page. The real bit of work was actually getting the new output on all the pages.

The original layout had carved out a small space for the price, but the now there are multiple prices covering a much larger area.

Unfortunately there was no template, all the pages were static HTML and every page was a giant multi-column, multi-row table, the kind where you touch a col or row span and everything breaks (the auto generated kind of table).

Alright, so I updated the images and removed the old the price chrome. Surround the whole table with a div, set to position relative and drop the iframe on every page and style that to be positioned where it should be. Done.