Project Upgrade from Umbraco 4 to Umbraco 7
CATEGORY
Online portal / .NET items / Charity & non-profits
TECHNOLOGY
.NET, C#, Microsoft SQL Server, Telerik Ajax UI, Umbraco 7, Bootstrap 3, JQuery, JS plugins, Google ReCaptcha V2 and Google Maps & Google Geolocation APIs
Our client
Our client is Keep Britain Tidy, a well-known charity that has been running environmental programmes since 1954 with the goal to stamp out the rising problem of litter in the UK. We had previously worked with this client on several successful projects, including their eponymous portal Keep Britain Tidy, Clean for the Queen, Love Where You Live, Love Parks and The Big Tidy Up, and Green Flag Awards is their latest project.
Project Goal
The Green Flag Award celebrates well managed parks and other public green spaces, with the goal to promote better care for our environment and to showcase how important these spaces are for our communities and that it’s everyone’s responsibility to care for them.
Park administrators submit their entries on the Green Flag Award platform, the parks are then evaluated by judges and the winners are publicly recognized and rewarded.
Client Request
maintenance & support for their legacy platform based on Umbraco 4
new business logic features
to adapt the website for mobile devices
Solution
Maintenance process
At first we took over the legacy platform built on the Umbraco 4 CMS and implemented the first upgrades that were needed. We rebuilt the sections of the platform dedicated to the competition judges, the parks and the platform administrators. We added new features to these sections, to optimize the workflow for each type of user, while preserving the same public interface.
The new platform
The new functionalities required could no longer be implemented on the old database and we suggested re-writing the backend and adding new business logic features. We rewrote the entire platform, including the public interface, on Umbraco 7, migrating all of the content and data. This process was a bit of a challenge, due to its complexity, as well as refactoring their entire database and the outdated code, in order to meet the new requirements, but our experts were up to the task and were able to finish the project sooner than the deadline that we had initially estimated
Old website version
- Umbraco 4.0
- ASP.NET 4.0
- Telerik Recaptcha
- jQuery
New website version
- Umbraco 7.0
- ASP.NET 4.5
- Marker Clustering
- Telerik Ajax UI
- Google ReCaptcha V2 and Google Maps & Google Geolocation APIs
- JQuery
- Bootstrap 3
The most important features that we added or improved
Maps improvement
- Modern UI
- Loading performance
- Pin clustering optimized for a large numbers of pins
- Advanced search for multiple countries
- Award type is listed on the map
- Redesigned park profile, enriched with lightbox, can now be accessed by clicking on its corresponding pin
Home page improvement
- Award winners on map
- Featured winner park each day
- Social media news feed
News feed improvement
- Faster loading
- Pagination instead of the old listing style
- Quality images, highlighted using lightbox
Forms improvement
- Better structure and layout
- Simplified contact process
- Multi-country field to make sure that each request goes directly to the organization that the user meant to contact
- We improved both the general contact form as well as the one for applying to become a judge
- Multi-country sub-admin roles to manage requests more efficiently, under the oversight of an overall platform admin
PDF viewer
Integration with an interactive PDF viewer to allow the users to read important reports and documents directly online without having to download locally
Additional benefits:
Improved performance following the best Google Page Speed guidelines
Automated 24/7 server health monitoring utilizing Pingdom monitoring tool
Daily Backup process and recovery plan set in place
Increased security due to new features from Umbraco 7
Increased SEO performance due to better on site optimization
Responsive design
Roweb were amazing. Thanks to their improvements to the GFA administration system, we’re able to save hours of work every day. They proved that they truly understand our business and were able to identify the best ways to make user flows more efficient. As for the front-end, they helped us offer the best experience to our website’s visitors. Roweb are always quick to respond to our requests and understand our needs, getting it right first time.
Paul Todd
Manager, Green Flag Awards