Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on Windows Server 2003
This entire
website is running on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. All of our pages and
pop-ups are powered by SharePoint Lists which are used to store the content.
Why use SharePoint for a website?
SharePoint as a platform gives us the ability to quickly develop rich
internet or intranet based websites that can be easily updated by just about
anyone that can use an internet browser. Since SharePoint is built on top of the
.NET Framework, we have also been able to leverage our existing skill-sets to
build customized enhancements to serve our needs as you may have seen as you
navigate through our website.
Why WSS3.0 instead of MOSS 2007?
While we’ve developed many traditional MOSS 2007 sites utilizing the
product’s Content Management capabilities, we felt it was important to
demonstrate how businesses can utilize the core services within WSS3.0 while
taking advantage of the low cost of entry. WSS still offers the ability to
separate content from presentation and ultimately provides content updating
capabilities via just a web browser. We’ve found WSS hosting for about
$30/month, perfect for small-to-medium sized businesses.
Why doesn't this website look like SharePoint?
Well, it can but this is so much cooler isn’t it? We started out with
Heather Solomon's Base Master Page for WSS which took out a lot of the
standard out of the box SharePoint specific formatting, allowing us to
concentrate on design and functionality.
How is the website
content and design updated?
The design maximizes on the usage of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) throughout
all of the pages. We use CSS to control the templates’ background images, fonts,
colors, menu highlighting, and even color themes for the homepage and sub pages.
We also use CSS to hide a lot of the unused SharePoint controls.
As far
as the content goes, we can update the majority of the content through Picture
Libraries and Lists. We really tried to stay away from Content Editor Web Parts,
as the data in these cannot be easily accessed. With Lists and Libraries, we
were able to utilize custom fields that give us the ability to control the
behavior of content pop-ups, sorting, paging the data items (Next and Previous
functionality), and the ability to easily swap out content with ease. This
website can be completely updated with little work or design from a user. We
eliminated the need for content authors to worry about the styling of their work
by taking care of all the formatting with strictly defined CSS and other backend
code. So all an author has to do is input their data and everything will be
displayed correctly. We also found the Datasheet view to be effective in
managing elements of the site such as the Global Navigation. Being in Datasheet
view enables us to quickly view and edit existing navigation positions in
relation to its peers.
How long did it take to build this website?
The time spent to create this website was about 2 weeks, divided among two
part time resources.
What SharePoint elements and web parts were used to compose each of
the pages?
[Above] Our homepage uses Data View Web Parts to control the top navigation.
We also use these web parts in the Featured Clients and Case Study modules.
[Above] The Top Navigation list provides a custom Hyperlink, menu order,
on/off, and a PageKey which is compared to a query string to display
highlighting. This provides more flexible navigation and control than the
out of the box navigation, which does not easily allow highlighting of
current the current page.
[Above] Data View Web Parts on the left display content from the news and
the events lists. Each link targets the iframe of the Page Viewer Web Part
on the right. This allows us to swap out content without page refreshes.