We have received many compliments on the new site design.  We still aren't finished and have to make some adjustments for Firefox.  We have also received a few questions about how we did certain things.  One thing you may have noticed is that we do not have any drop down menus in the navigation.  I have always been a fan of primary navigation along the top and secondary navigation down the left.  Here are just a few of the advantages of removing the dropdown menu based navigation:

1. Usability studies have shown that drop down menus are not as user friendly as traditional HTML based navigation.
2. You don't have to worry about cross-browser compatibility.
3. Drop down menus are typically based on Javascript.  Search engine spiders cannot follow the links in menu structure.  Plain HTML is much more search engine friendly.
4. Page size - We reduced the average page size by 15k just by removing all references to the SolPart menu.

We knew from the start that we were not going to use the Javascript menu included with DNN.  However, one of the great things about the DotNetNuke menu is that it makes building out a site very easy.  Before we created the skin we built out the entire site using the default menu and basic blue skin.  Once we were satisfied with the site layout it was time to build the skin.  This site uses three skins: Home page, sub page and admin.  We created the sub page skin first then the admin skin.  The admin skin utilizes the DNN Tree Control to provide navigation.  The navigation across the top of the page is built using the LINKS skin object.  We also only added the Skin Objects to the skin that we knew we would have to use.  Since we weren't using the Javascript menu, we still needed a dynamic menu system for the left pane navigation, so we built one.

Left Pane Navigation Module
The most difficult skin task was creating the module to handle the left column navigation on all the sub pages.  We had built a similar setup for some custom projects that we did previously so we had a bit of a head start.  The end result is that the left hand column navigation is completely dynamic and produces plain HTML.  Right now it only supports 2-levels but we will be adding support for 3-levels very soon.

Other Modules
We wanted to use Active Forums as much as possible throughout the site.  The home page has three instances of the ActiveForums TopPosts Module.  You may have noticed that the Customer Testimonials on the home page change with every refresh.  This is also using the Top Posts module.  We did have to make some modifications so that it will return topics in a random order.  This feature will be included in the next release of the TopPosts module. 

We also have created additional FAQ sections for Active Forums and Active Cases.  Both of these pages are using the Active Forums Forum Viewer setup with a custom template.  Honestly, I'm not 100% satisfied with the end result so I will be making some improvements to the ForumViewer. 

The Buy Now page is also a module we created that processes orders, processes credit cards in real-time, stores the transaction information, creates a user account if necessary and then adds your account to the appropriate roles.  We still need fix the email and print receipt process.

The Active Cases Client module is used on the Support and My Account pages to manage support requests.

We are also developing a module called ActiveDownloads, which will replace the forums for managing product downloads. 

The My Account page will be a series of modules that interact with the core of ActiveCRM so that you can manage your account and view order history.

The only other module being used on the site is the Text/HTML, but we may be replacing that with something else too .

In Part 3 I will write about merging data from the previous site to the new database.

Thanks,
Will