This afternoon, we launched a fully responsive Cascade server site at http://www.gcccd.edu – Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District! This site was already in Cascade and the original graphical design was by another firm, but Beacon was entirely responsible for the new responsive design and the implementation into Cascade.

Big thanks to all those involved:

Jennifer did a lovely job of coming up with a responsive design that wasn’t too big a departure from their existing site, but still functional in a mobile capacity.

Tiffany did virtually all of the development and Cascade implementation herself, including her first solo site launch today! The client was able to work and publish in Cascade for the entire duration of the project while Tiffany developed and was only frozen out of Cascade for two days while the final implementation was completed, and that the implementation was completed a full day ahead of schedule!

Justin provided analysis assistance and a bit of as needed development.

In case you aren’t familiar with the term “responsive design”, it is defined as:

A responsive design meets the following criteria:

 

For the seventh year in a row, Beacon will be attending the 2012 Cascade Server User’s Conference, put on by Hannon Hill at the Georgia Tech’s Global Learning Center and Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  It’s something that I look forward to every year, and this year’s conference is going to be even better:  Beacon is officially a Gold Sponsor, and we will be continuing our tradition of participating in the conference since I’ll be speaking again for the fifth time.  We have really grasped the opportunities to present our development expertise and knowledge of Cascade Server.

In writing this blog, it got me thinking about all of Beacon’s previous presentations at the conference:

• 2006:  Participated in a round table panel discussing our use of Cascade Server.
• 2008:  Tips & Tricks for End Users
• 2009:  Tips & Tricks for End Users (Part II)
• 2010:  Web Marketing w/ Cascade Server CMS + Live SEO Reviews (by Brad Henry, Director of Web Marketing Services)
• 2011:  Creative Uses of Cascade Server

This year, I’ll be speaking about something near and dear to my Cascade heart:  Cascade Server Optimization techniques.  In today’s world, everyone wants their Web experience to be fast.  Our interaction with Cascade Server is no different:  we need to get our content edits and publishing done quickly.  Cascade Server can be fast, but if it’s not programmed correctly, it can be a slow experience.  The session will show Cascade programmers how to properly implement indexing blocks, XSLT code, and best practices for hardware configuration and hosting.

The conference is always a great time for Beacon folks to meet current and prospective clients.  We will have a booth set up in the lobby where conference participants can enter a drawing to win great Google-branded prizes, and of course, talk to Rick Boccard and me about anything Cascade, or any other Web needs:  Web Marketing, Web Hosting, or general Web Development.

Additionally, in keeping with the presentation theme, we will have the opportunity to sign up for a free Cascade Server Performance Assessment.  During this assessment, I’ll evaluate your page render speed, publishing speed, configuration, code and general implementation.  Afterwards, you will receive valuable insights and actionable recommendations that will improve the user experience and simplify maintenance.  We hope that all participants will find the assessment very beneficial in improving your excellent Cascade Server performance even more.

We look forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta on September 16th!

Beacon is proud of one of our latest higher education partners, The University of Wyoming.  We just recently had the opportunity to provide the Cascade Server development for a very cool, Virtual Orientation project which provides new students with a rich, multi-media introduction to Cowboy life and we’re currently working on integrating their new design into their 270+ Cascade Server sites.

The team working on the website redesign was recently treated to a huge box of Cowboy gear thanks to our awesome teammates at UWYO, so we took the chance to model it during a recent internal project meeting.

It’s been a lot of fun working for the University of Wyoming.  They are a great group of folks and we are proud to be a part of the Cowboy team.  Keep your eyes peeled for the launch of their new site in early October that will feature a great new design and several new Cascade Server features.

Greensboro (Feb-2012).  Since its early days, Beacon Technologies has had its hands in higher education.  It all began in the late 90’s when Accenture hired Beacon as a subcontractor to build the FAFSA and Campus-Based systems for the U.S. Department of Education.  Shortly thereafter, Bearing Point brought Beacon in to redesign and develop the website for Texas Southern University.  Then, back in 2005, after evaluating many different content management systems, Beacon hooked its wagon to Hannon Hill’s CMS product, Cascade Server, which is used widely by universities.  Now, in the last several weeks, Beacon has added Syracuse University, the University of Wyoming, the University of Scranton and the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) to an already impressive list of Higher Education clients.

“Cascade Server is a feature-rich, easy-to-use and well-supported product which is why so many colleges and universities use it,“ says Mark Dirks, Beacon’s CEO.  “The fact that we work with major universities all over the country now is a real testament to the great web technologists and customizable products that we have put together here at Beacon.”

Higher Education calls on Beacon for many different things, primarily custom web development and design, but also for mobile site development, digital web marketing, web hosting, strategic consultation and Google Analytics support.  “Most university websites have multiple stakeholders involved because there are typically several schools contained under the university umbrella,” says Dirks. “I believe Beacon’s experience with large technology projects helps bring efficiency and cost savings by walking all the parties confidently and successfully through the process.”

Last year, Beacon worked with Winston-Salem State University to redesign its entire website with over 3000 web pages.  After the project, Dr. Brenda Allen, the University’s Provost said, “Beacon’s experience with Cascade Server & proven web development methodology were key factors in guiding our Steering Committee and University through the entire process. They delivered a state-of-the-art website with the functionality and administrative capabilities that our students, parents, faculty, alumni and administration need in today’s technology.”

Here’s a sampling of Beacon’s clients within the Higher Education vertical: 

• Syracuse University
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Hartford
• Framingham State University
• University of North Alabama
• University of NC – Greensboro
• North Carolina A&T University
• St. Mary’s College of Maryland
• Georgia Tech
• University of Wyoming
• Texas A&M University
• American University of Antigua
• University of Scranton
• Randolph Macon College
• University of Houston
• Rollins College
• Wake Forest University
• Florida International University
• Winston-Salem State University
• Texas Southern
• Albright College
• George Brown College
• North Carolina State University
• Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

 

“These relationships also lead to other education-related opportunities with clients like The Princeton Review and the Massachusetts Library Information Network (State of MA), which have been with Beacon for 4 years and 10 years respectively,” says Dirks.  “I’m also excited about a few other major colleges that we expect to sign during this quarter.”

Beacon Technologies, headquartered in Greensboro NC, has been a leader in web development, web marketing and managed web hosting since 1998.  The company specializes in delivering web solutions that effectively grow its clients’ business through creative, easy-to-use design, driving more web traffic, improving conversion rates for sales and leads, and providing reliable web infrastructure.  The company distinguishes itself not only due to the mix of custom, integrated web services, but by the deep level of technical expertise it brings to each specific area.  As a result, Beacon’s customers can obtain a complete and effective web presence that automates, grows and connects their business via the web.  Beacon was selected by Google as a Google Analytics Partner, by Hannon Hill as a Cascade Server CMS Development Partner, by AspDotNetStorefront as a Premier Development Partner, by Bridgeline Digital as its IAPPS Product Suite Solutions Partner for the Carolinas.

We launched another great site for ITW Texwipe at http://www.texwipe.com! This site seamlessly blends the functionality of Hannon Hill’s CMS (the Products, Industries and Technical Data menus) with a full-featured ecommerce store (the Buy Texwipe menu), with shared navigation and design. This is the first project that integrated both products at the same time and, thanks to hard work by pretty much everyone on the software dev team at one point or another. 

Other interesting features of the site:

• Ability to “hide” pages from different geographical regions, based on the “region” selection of the visitor in the footer.

• Transition of transactional applications from old system to new
• Email verification required to place order

 

 

We’re proud to announce the release of the Greensboro Housing Authority redesign!  As always, Beacon was right on-time with our deliverables, which is always our goal.  The client chose a soft launch date of December 1, 2011 because they wanted to show the new site to their Board of Directors at their annual meeting that day.

Their Web site was designed and constructed in-house several years ago, which meant that it was time for a completely new look.  The site also had content that was very out-of-date, so the client took it upon themselves to do a complete rewrite of the content, and restructure the site to be more intuitive.  Also, they wanted to get away from having to update the site by-hand using HTML, and wanted it in a content management system.  Finally, they wanted a new Web hosting partner.

Enter Beacon:

• We provided them with a brand-new graphical design;
• Developed it to display perfectly in multiple browsers;
• Implemented the new site into Cascade Server (content management system) to allow multiple users to update the content with an easy-to-use solution;
• Incorporated a new search feature;
• Imported approximately 60 pages of content, including 20 fact sheets about each of their properties;
• Transferred their Web site to a shared hosting package here at Beacon.

Several Beacon staff members made this project a success:

• Wendy:  Without much direction from the client, Wendy put together a design that they liked on the first try, which is phenomenal.
• Stephanie:  She was instrumental in getting the project off the ground, attending the initial meetings and providing meeting notes, the business requirements, and proposed site hierarchy.
• Zed:  He was thrown into the fire, as this was his first development project here.  He developed the front-end HTML/CSS/jQuery, and implemented the site into Cascade Server (which he picked up on very quickly), and entered most of the content.
• Tiffany:  Provided assistance and training to Zed.
• Justin:  Project Management and Cascade Server documentation & training.
• Beacon’s Technical Support Group (TSG):  And finally, no site hosting transfer is complete without the efforts of TSG, specifically Caleb and William, for setting up the hosting and troubleshooting some DNS issues over a weekend.

This is another high-quality design to add to our portfolio, and another non-profit site we can be proud of.   Thanks to everyone involved!

Before

After

One of our recent enhancements to the Beacon website included integrating components of our blog into the content of the site. This is visible on the homepage under the “Blog” tab and shows the three most recent postings on our WordPress blog. Additionally, we decided to include links to recent blog links by categories or topic on the page. For example, the SEO Management page would produce blog links that fell in the SEO category. This is applied throughout the site on interior pages, which is effective for SEO as each page will be updated with every blog posting we create (given the post falls in the category of the page displayed).

The blog feed on the homepage was much easier in comparison worked like this:

XSLT Format used in Cascade:

This is a simple ASP literal that will be the populated by the blog feed.

<xsl:comment>#START-CODE<asp:Literal id=”litFeedReaderBlog” runat=”server”/>#END-CODE</xsl:comment>

VB for CodeBehind File:

VB CodeBehind File (.pdf)

This small set of code basically links to page with RSS feed, in this case, the general RSS feed for entire blog. The part shown in red needs to match the URL of the RSS feed to your particular WordPress site. The part shown in green is a relative path to the XSL file you will use to format the output. Lastly, the part in blue needs to match the ID of your ASP literal so the codebehind knows where to place the output.

Most WordPress sites use the following schema to the feed: http://sitename.com/rss

Example: http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/feed

The above linked RSS page acts as the data source for the VB CodeBehind file and uses an XSL file (shown below) to format the output to the page. Because this RSS page is updated and managed by WordPress, the output is always up to date with the blog.

XSLT used by CodeBehind File for Output:

XSLT File (.pdf)

This XSL will limit the number of posts displayed to the most recent 3 posts (First 3 listed on RSS page–Code shown in green) and will output it in a way to provide a linked title, the author and date, as well as a snipped from the article itself and ‘Read More’ link. We used JavaScript to clean up some of the output that the RSS feed delivers, such as the [...] text and cleaned up the way links were displayed in the snippet.  You can visit the blog feed page and view source to get the XML data that will be processed by the XSLT.

So, if you followed all that and put it into practice, you get something like this (after styling):

Now, to implement category control, we needed to add an additional Data Definition within Cascade on every page that would set the category. We used a simple drop-down that had an entry for every category we have on our blog. Notice below that the data-definition values need to be URL-friendly. The reason for this is that the modified blog feed with category control will integrate this category to the blog’s general RSS feed. We are going to pass this category information to the codebehind file for processing by sticking the data definition value into the ASP literal’s text attribute. All interior pages would use the same codebehind file as to avoid the need for a new configuration type that would need published with each page.  The only maintenance that goes along with the blog feed is adding new ones to the data definitions as they are created in WordPress.

The code and logic above was primarily followed for the related links, but had to be modified to fit the following specs:

• Have Cascade output a text attribute on the ASP literal containing the category to be used (grabbed from data definitions) which would be passed as a parameter to the functions used in the original VB Codebehind.
• List out 3 of the most recent blogs (just linked titles, somewhat simplified from homepage output) from the blog category set in the data definition. If NO data definition is set for the ‘blog category’, use the ‘Section’ data definition value (which shown above is required on all of our pages.) The section value is a fall-back to one of the three parent categories on the blog: Web Development, Web Marketing, and Web Hosting.  Notice we can’t just use the values of the ‘Section’ data because it does not match the URL structure on WordPress.
• If there aren’t 3 posts for the blog category that has been set in the data definition, retrieve what posts are available and then use one or two posts the parent category (depending on how many needed to make 3 posts).

At first, the solution Justin and I had come up with, was to make the VB smart enough to recognize when less than 3 posts were output and go out and grab the remaining from the parent category. The issue with this was that the parent category of any category might list already output postings by the sub-category (since they are listed in order of most recent). Therefore, we had to heavily modify the codebehind file in a way that it would ALSO recognize not to output duplicate posts from the parent category.

XSLT Format and Template Changes in Cascade:

Every page needs to get the codebehind file.  In Cascade, this is accomplished by adding the following to the template:

<!–#START-ROOT-CODE<%@ Page Language=”VB” aspcompat=”true” AutoEventWireup=”false”  CodeFile=”/rightColumnBlogFeed.aspx.vb” Inherits=”_Default” %>#END-ROOT-CODE–>

We saw that http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/feed shows a listing from all categories (10 of the most recent being shown).  We can change the URL to include one of our categories, say… Web Marketing — just by changing the URL to http://blog.beacontechnologies.com/category/web-marketing/feed.  Notice the RSS feed is then modified to fit the category and still listed (as defaulted in WordPress) by most recent posts.  The XSLT file below was used to select either the post category or section for outputting the text attribute of the ASP literal.

Modified XSLT File (.pdf)

Changes in VB Codebehind & CodeBehind’s XSLT

While I’d prefer not to share our exact source code, here are the modification necessary to the templated file above to prevent duplicate stories from being output.

• The ‘BuildFeed’ function had the first parameter changed to the ASP literal’s text value.
• The XSLT file got dutplicated, one to output 3 posts and one to grab the full page of posts generated by the RSS (10).  Both had ‘~’ characters appended after each list item.
• The BuildFeed function would fetch what posts it could from the blog category, if there are less than 3, it would record the titles of the categories found and load them into an array (This was the reason for ‘~’ character being added–Parsing values was a bit easier this way using the split function.)
• The BuildFeed function would then visit the parent categories RSS page and compare post title with those in the subcategory recorded in the array.  If they matched, it skipped the post, otherwise appended it in with list to be included.  Because we didn’t have any categories with less than 3 posts, I was able to just switch my XSL file used by the codebehind to output only 2 posts–and the VB would take care of the rest and use the 10 post page parent.  Controlling the output this way made it much easier to debug and test that the proper number of posts being output from the parent category and subcategory feeds.

Beacon is pleased to announce the launch of Framingham State University’s Academics section redesign.

After completing a redesign of Framingham State University’s main website in the summer of 2010, the client contracted with us to address the Academics section such that it would be more effective in reaching prospective and current students.  Well, we are proud to announce the launch of the newly redesigned Academics section and all department sections as well.  The client had a very tight deadline for this project in order to have the new site launch coincide with a planned ad campaign.  Beacon’s Web Development Team juggled its resource plan to complete this project on time and within budget (again)!

 

Justin Klingman managed the project and Wendy Honeycutt, worked directly with the client to create the beautiful design.  Keana Lynch completed the template and Cascade development a little early and perfectly, and Thomas Brinegar customized the jQuery homepage slideshow on the Academics homepage.

Here’s a very nice article about website navigation from our partners over at Hannon Hill, the developers of our preferred content management system Cascade Server:  Designing Your Navigation – Hannon Hill Corp.

I’ll also add a content matrix template that I use to record a site’s current and redesigned structure during the analysis phase of the project, before development begins.  There are two tabs in the spreadsheet– one for “current site” and one for “redesigned site.”  The redesigned site is pretty self-explanatory, but the current site information is often neglected in anticipation of starting the new project.  While it may seem superfluous to annotate a site that will be redesigned, documenting the current site ensures that no sections are “lost” during the transition (note that unless the current site map is maintained dynamically, these are rarely kept up to date).

I have seen time and time again that the success of a redesign can often be determined in the first few weeks of a project by how carefully the site is cataloged in advance.  As Kat notes so well in her article:

I cannot stress enough how crucial it is to map out the structure of your website prior to designing the navigation, especially if you are implementing one of the most powerful capabilities of a content management system, namely content reuse in the form of dynamic navigation.

Happy mapping!

I recently came across an article that really made me think. We all know you can find just about anything on the Internet (whether it’s true or not, malicious or not, etc.). But have you ever stopped to wonder how many Web pages actually exist out there?

Well, as is the case with most curiosity-minded people, someone’s ponying up the capital to find out.  Apparently a group named the World Wide Web Foundation is getting a $1 million grant from Google to find out.  The article can be found here.

The results are supposed to come out early next year.  I’m very interested to see the final number.  Apparently the founder of Wired magazine estimated that there are approximately a trillion pages.  The problem as I see it is, the Internet is growing at an exponential rate, right?  Doesn’t that mean that the second that they finish counting, their data will be severely out-of-date?  It’s like buying a new smartphone, and the next day, they come out with a new version of it.  Blast!

Keep in mind that Google and other search engines are indexing most of these pages.  Given the sheer number of pages out there, it has to make you wonder, “Are my pages getting lost out there?”  This is another reason why web marketing grows in importance every single day.

Whatever the number may be, I’m proud to be part of a company that has contributed a large number of good-looking Web pages to the Internet mass.  Fortunately, content management tools like Cascade Server have allowed our clients to also easily contribute to that number.

Come to think of it, we have a tool here that will tell us how many pages exist on a particular Web site (also number of images, PDFs, etc.). Maybe I can start a scan of the Internet with it to count pages. It’ll probably finish scanning in 2016.