Portfolio: Cascade Equipment redevelopment
Step one of the redevelopment of the Cascade Equipment website is to create a new template. There will eventually be hundreds of products listed online, and the site visitor needs to know where they are, where they've been and where they can go next. Much of the design from the previous html version had to be retained because of all the supporting stationery and brochures that have been developed in recent years.
The server moved from a MAMP Mac server to a Windows Server 2003, and in the process we migrated to ASP away from PHP. ASP is mostly being used for includes and simple switch functions, but the next step of development will be more ambitious.
Rather than go with a shakey open source product or a hilariously expensive enterprise level server, Cascade Equipment had a web server database already installed that worked well with ASP and could handle the workload. Pervasive has been quietly making a great database for 20 years, and the Cascade Equipment website is going to use it for a web server. Fortunately, ASP is very similar to PHP and PSQL queries are essentially the same as MySQL or SQL. Our initial tests have gone well.
When the entire product line is online, Cascade Equipment should rank higher in search engines. The HTML code behind the scenes is being streamlined for search engine friendliness.