​Welcome to our new website!  We've been working for many months to create a new corporate site that that not only looks good.  The site that you are looking at is the product of many hours of hard work from members of the SharePoint911 team.  We'll be posting some information about the various components that comprise the site in a "How we did it" series to following in the coming weeks. 

Until then, I'll give you a few highlights.  The site you are looking at is 100% SharePoint Server 2010.  There's been no cheating here.  With other sites you might notice significant portions of the page are delivered through Silverlight or Flash, or possibly just hard coded HTML.  We set out to create a site which could be edited in a user friendly fashion and stayed true to the page editing capabilities of SharePoint 2010.  For example, when you put the page into edit mode it looks like it is supposed to -- there's field controls and web part zones that anyone could edit. 

Mega Dropdown Navigation

Mega Dropdown navigation is very popular these days, so when we set out to design the site it was something we wanted to make sure to incorporate.  The Mega Dropdown is driven from SharePoint lists and at this time it doesn't pull from SharePoint navigation.  Although the end result is custom we've tried to create a management experience for the Mega Dropdown that is still easy to use and intuative.

Contact Us

It may not look like much on the surface, but the Contact Us functionality is another area of the site we hoped to improve on.  One of the challenges we've faced in the past is the ability to create and update an anonymous form on the website without needing to involve a developer.  The resulting web part does exactly that.  Any user can easily create a simple form that can be quickly customized. If there was ever a need to create new forms, all the user would have to do is create a new page, add the webpart and customize. 

Rotator

Whether it is for public sites or internal sites, everyone likes rotators.  They are a great way to add lots of information to a small space and at the same time be a visually interesting element.  Our roator of choice these days is FlexSlider. We've combined the jQuery to pull from a SharePoint list and added it to a web part which allows the user to choose the various display options.

News and Events

On the homepage we've got a customized Content Query Web Part (CQWP) which is rolling up news items as we create them.  It is just your regular old CQWP with customized XSLT to make it render in a different way.

And even more...

I still haven't mentioned the blog aggregator and the twitter feed.  We'll try to cover everything in our How We Did it series.  But if you see something you like and are interested to hear more -- drop us a message!

Our goal was to create a SharePoint site with a look and feel that was similar to other sites on the Internet.  We think we've achieved our goal, but we aren't satifisfied yet! This process has only given us more ideas about things we want to do and improve on the things we've created.  Stay tuned!

-John Ross