The Challenge

Procentrix’s public website is critical to our marketing, recruiting, and partnering strategy. Its features and functionality must support our objectives in these areas. First and foremost, non-technical individuals in the company need a way to quickly and easily publish content to our various target audiences. Content needs to be presented in a consistent fashion and branded in accordance with our image so it can be easily consumed by our audiences. This was addressed using page templates that consistently organize content on like pages throughout the site. Next, the site needs to empower individuals to share knowledge and information outside our company. This is accomplished using internally hosted-SharePoint blog sites. Next, the site needs to be intuitive and employ the latest techniques in UI design. This is accomplished by incorporating various jQuery-based UI elements throughout the site. And finally, the site needs to be optimized over time for commercial search engines. This is achieved through various customizations that Procentrix has developed in support of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of SharePoint-based websites.

The new Procentrix’s public website demonstrates, not only through its content, but also through the website itself that Procentrix is a premier provider of innovative IT-based solutions that leverage the full power of COTS-based products like Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Our website makes it extremely easy to manage content, minimizing the burden placed on our busy staff to author content.  We also leverage many techniques to minimize how much content even needs to be authored within the site. We achieve this by automatically aggregating and presenting down-level content on various pages throughout the site, eliminating the need to author links, edit flash animations, etc. For example, no content is ever authored on our home page yet it remains fresh and active by rolling up featured page content and information which is simply authored on other pages within the site. We also now have a website that contains all of the required technical components which are required for Search Engine Optimization and our site authors have a very simple means of tagging their content to promote ongoing Search Engine Optimizations(SEO).

Our objective in building Procentrix's public site was two-fold.  First and foremost, we needed the site to support our own business objectives as noted on the business tab. Secondly, we wished to demonstrate to our clients that there is no limit as to what type of UI customizations can be achieved when using SharePoint as a Content Management Platform.  From a technical perspective, SharePoint as a Web Content Management platform is a logical choice for us. Like many organizations, we use SharePoint heavily as an internal tool for our portal and collaboration needs as well as for a number of lines of business applications. That being the case, it makes no sense for us to introduce a separate tool to support our public-facing WCM needs.  Our people are familiar with SharePoint and they can leverage their same skills to manage both internal and external content.  On a technical level, our public website leverages various SharePoint features, many of which we plan to discuss in an upcoming “Making of Procentrix.com” blog series.  Site highlights include:

• Term Store Metadata – The ability to easily navigate to related content from any page within the site was an important design objective. We achieve this by leveraging SharePoint’s new Term Store in concert with various enhancements made to the SharePoint 2010 Content Query Web Part (CQWP)
• Content Query Web Parts (CQWP) – We minimize the need to author content on many pages. We achieve this by aggregating content found elsewhere in the site using CQWP web parts. For example, we can feature any page within the site on our home page simply by tagging the page as a feature page and providing a feature image, feature text, etc. Custom CQWPs on our home page takes care of presenting the featured content.
• jQuery – We leverage jQuery throughout the site. Most prominently on the homepage where a unique combination of jQuery and CQWPs are used to feature content via jQuery-based slider control. We also leverage jQuery to achieve accordion style left menu navigation to help simplify the amount of menu items that presented to users and enhance usability.
• Master Pages and Layout pages – All of our unique branding is achieved using one Master page and a series of Page Layouts.  Our page design extensively leverages custom content types so as to facilitate the presentation of structure information on pages and to collect metadata used for the search and navigational aspects of the site.
• Blog Sites – We built upon the great work done by the Open Source Community's SharePoint Community Kit Enhanced Blog Edition to enable our SharePoint 2010-based blog sites. Hosting blogs within our site is important to us because it helps drive site traffic and improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Procentrix.com is not just another pretty website based on static HTML pages. By properly leveraging SharePoint’s WCM features and functionality, we now have a dynamic platform for authoring content in an easy and intuitive manner.  Beyond this, our authors can easily establish relationships to other content which makes the site more consumable by our end users with far fewer clicks for them to get where they want. For example, when a user finds their way to our SharePoint technology page, they not only see what we do with SharePoint but also:

• Our Related Capabilities
• Technologies that we support that are related to SharePoint
• Jobs that we have open involving SharePoint
• Case studies where we used SharePoint

Our readers need not click all over our site trying to make these correlations themselves.  Try it out by visiting our SharePoint page. Click Here…