Bestnetworksecurity.com switches from Joomla to ExpressionEngine

Adam Khan, Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

BestNetworkSecurity, a web site selling network security products and expertise, was running on the Joomla content management system and perplexing not only its users but even its owners. The site had various types of content, including products, vendors, seminars and articles, but all were being handled the same way. Things should be as simple as they can be, as a wise man once said, but no simpler. With the conversion to ExpressionEngine, we added enough complexity to the site architecture to simplify both its maintenance for the owners and its navigation for users.

On the original Joomla site, all the various types of content were lumped together, so to reap the benefits of running BestNetworkSecurity.com on ExpressionEngine the site had to be rearchitected. There was also a time factor, as BestNetworkSecurity.com had scheduled an online seminar and wanted the new site ready before then.

Solution

Talking via Skype, BestNetworkSecurity.com principal Jon Robinson and your author EngagingNet principal Adam Khan reviewed the site exhaustively in order to map out all its various types of content.

We then made these various types of content more manageable by using Mark Huot’s Nested Weblogs extension to group them into a handful of collection groups (Events, Marketing, Merchandise and Sales), each collection group in turn containing a more manageable small handful of collections.

One important breakthrough in the site’s architecture was understanding BestNetworkSecurity.com’s concept of Line Cards, which led to setting vendors and product families and lines as hierarchical categories rather than as content entries.

We then installed the standard EngagingNet melee of ExpressionEngine plugins and extensions:

Find and Replace
Textile
Live-search
Simplify Edit Table
LG Add Sitename
Clone Entries
Edit Tab AJAX
Category Checkboxes
Textile Editor Helper

In order to better integrate member functionality such as logging in, registering for seminars and maintaining member profiles, we used the Solspace User and Freeform modules.

To help speed up the job and keep costs down, and as rather bright web folks themselves, BestNetworkSecurity.com followed along behind and did quite a bit of the job themselves.

And we discussed the site’s business goals, which helped us structure the new homepage and led to simple but important new features such as placing a quick contact form prominently and ubiquitously in the site-wide template header.

Results

Using categories for vendors and product families and lines made it easy to knit together various types of content. Any content about Sophos products, for example, whether a piece of merchandise, seminar, article, white paper, FAQ or datasheet, can easily list all the others. This architecture also enabled pages for the various product families and lines to show and link to their parent and child product and lines.

“We hired Adam because his skill at architecting our diverse information and mapping our feature requirements to Expression Engine was immediately apparent,” Jon wrote after the new site was launched on time and under budget. “He did a fabulous job unlocking us from our Joomla shackles and putting us on a platform that will allow our site to serve our customers more effectively. He was extremely responsive and offered skilled insight to our concerns and offered valuable input that guided us throughout the development process.”

Thank you Jon for the kind words, the opportunity to work with you on your site, and for your resolute faith once we got rolling.