Mid South Building Supply, Inc. has been a trusted partner to professional homebuilders & remodeling contractors since 1966. Their Kitchen Design centers feature the finest in custom cabinetry and counter tops. In addition, Mid South carries a full line of vinyl siding along with window and door products and accessories. I have been connected with them since 1999 long ago when I worked in their warehouses and before my IT career even began!
For many years, they ran an in-house website built on basic HTML and PHP practices utilizing a MySQL database to make changes to navigation and content. In early 2008, I began the process of migrating them into a more modern web environment. The requirements were simple. It had to be easy to navigate, be appealing to potential new customers and not lose sight of legacy applications used to track installer jobs and documentation from their suppliers.
Since the website would be hosted in-house, the decision to move the site into a more Microsoft server environment was made. I chose to utilize SQL Server 2005, as they had licenses in place for their existing Exchange server environment, for the back-end which was easily paired to a Dot Net Nuke CMS.
Multiple designs were drafted, some started where they left off, others were designed by yours-truly from the ground up. Ultimately, an entirely new design was picked and the template was created and configured for DNN. The site contains multiple pages of product information, legacy applications, testimonials and more. They are now able to edit and maintain content via the DNN editors and can easily involve the SQL Server website data with their daily/weekly backups routines.
The project was started in early 2008 and was completed mid 2009. This includes a total of two website build-outs, with only one surviving. The hosting environment, DNS and database are managed by in-house IT staff. I do continue to perform maintenance on the website and am working to being completely W3C and XHTML compliant.
Tech Bits:
- DNN Community 5.x
- SQL Server 2005
- C#/XHTML/CSS2
