Link: http://www.stlbikefed.org

About the Website:

www.stlbikefed.org is a public website that Efficion Software created for the St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation on a limited budget. The site serves as a resource for news and information about bicycling in the St. Louis region.

The site contains around 50 pages of information on general bicycling, biking in and around St. Louis, and about the BikeFed. The many features include: automatically updating newsfeeds from other Bicycling organization, online membership registration, online event registration, syndicated news and information, display and tracking of ads for sponsoring organizations, events calendars, feedback forms, online discussion lists, document libraries with current and past issues of the newsletter, and a powerful and flexible navigation system.

Benefits of using DotNetNuke:

By using and extending DotNetNuke, we were able to create a great site with lots content that could be easily maintained the BikeFed's board members.

• DotNetNuke's built in Content Management framework made it very easy for the board members to create site content and keep it up to date.
• The tab navigation system and tab structure made it easy to quickly create an Information Architecture that is easy to navigate, well organized, and easy to change.
• The many included modules as well as some 3rd party modules made it easy to provide most of the needed functionality of the site with only a little custom coding required for some online forms.
• Built-in integration with Paypal and built in banner ads made it easy to make the site a revenue generating site.
• Built in Search Engine Optimization to make sure that the site shows up near the top of relevant searches through the major search engines.

Project Challenges:

• A large amount of information needed to be presented in an easy to navigate format.
• Multiple board members needed to be able to post new news items and events to the site from any computer.
• A very limited budget which required that a fairly non-technical administrator needed to be able to create, organize, and update most of the site content.

Technical Challenges:

• The primary creators of the site were non-techies and therefore needed a site that was easy to create and administer.
• The previous site had several online forms for online registration and that integrated with PayPal. These forms had to be rewritten in .Net.

Customizations:

• A custom form was created and made into a Private Assembly module for online registration for the swapmeet.
• A modified version of Scott McCulloch's News Article module was added to the site and modified to meet the desired look and functionality.
• A custom header image was created for the site
• A weather module was created from the weatherroom.com.