I finally feel like I can go to bed with the website ready to face the world.  The last big hurdle is the multiple hostnames we own that we would like associating with the main website www.webapplicationsuk.com.  Most notably, www.webappuk.com and www.webapplicationsuk.co.uk, both of which we own currently.  Although I could just add them as portal aliases they would then be indexed separately by search engines (e.g. Google), to the detriment of the site ranking.  Instead it’s necessary to issue a 301 redirect (permanent redirect) when  navigating to a page on a ‘holding URL’.

This is especially important as our hostname has always historically been www.webappuk.com.  Last year I made the decision to use the longer, but more ‘guessable’ www.webapplicationsuk.com, which we’ve since marketed heavily.  Unfortunately, all our rankings are based on the old URL, 301 redirects can sort that out.

A second issue I had was with our heavily publicised http://www.webapplicationsuk.com/rss.xml RSS Feed.  Obviously, it would be a disaster to lose this feed, however, to use URL Master et al then XML would have to be registered on the ASP handlers to allow the .NET Framework to process all incoming .xml requests, something of an overkill when we only want this one instance handling.

This is where ISAPI_Rewrite comes into play.

One of the things that attracted me to DNN was the numerous modules that purported to improve SEO.  Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as free SEO, it’s just a painful slog of trying to follow best practices everywhere you can, but every now and then something throws a spanner in the works.

Well our first ever Acumen Division User Group Seminar is approaching fast, and with over 100 confirmed guests, it looks like being a real event.  There’s serious issues to be addressed following the takeover of Kelworth, but hopefully Monday will mark the start of a new, more reliable future, for our Acumen division customers.

Tuesday sees our second User Group Seminar for the Travel Division, it’s been a really busy year and lots had happened at Web Applications, so I’m looking forward to sharing some of the news with our customers, and getting a chance to meet up.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on DNN 5, and although it’s very unstable (we uninstalled it in February after a number of aborted starts), it had a few features that really attracted me.  Plus, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I really didn’t want to do a 4.9.2 –> 5.1.0 upgrade when the site is live in May.  For that reason I thought I’d give the upgrade root another go.

I started by binning the XMod & XMod IDE modules, although we’ve paid for them, they’re just not ready for 5 yet, at least not really until XMod 5.5 is out, and frankly we’re not using them yet.  After that I backed up, can’t beat backing up when doing something stupid.

Applying a DNN upgrade should be as simple as copying the new files over the existing website and hitting the homepage.  But I’ve been learning a lot in the last month or so, so I took an altogether more cautious approach, besides I wanted to treat the update as if I was working with a live site.

I have been working on a lighter version of Tr@veller to help satisfy more niche markets.  My aim will be to create a version initially that will support the cottage segment of the travel industry.

From this blog I’ll be posting about the progress we make on the backend of the Acumen Website replacement project.  This system is designed to be a centralised interface that will both drive the replacement Acumen websites and also allow clients to access it directly to drive their own websites, where required.

I will be writing here about the ongoing work on the Acumen Website replacement project. This in intended to give old Kelworth customers a replacement to the existing problematic web solution which will provide a stable and customisable foundation to build on for the future, watch this space !

I’m not going to pretend it’s been at all easy, but the new website is approaching completion.  I think the homepage looks gorgeous on a widescreen monitor (as shown), and very modern and ‘active’.  The focus has shifted from being a sales tool to a community website, which I think is an important move.  Of course, it’ll still have to do it’s bit for sales as well.

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I’ve installed the default DNN blog module and finally managed to install Windows Live Writer which can be downloaded from http://download.live.com/writer.  There was no end of problems installing the thing, it kept rolling back, but a reboot and clean install seemed to do the trick.

When I ran WLW I had the misfortune of being unable to download the theme for editing the blog in the site theme, this is a shame, but according to this blog it’s a known problem.

Anyway, I’m posting this directly from WLW and hopefully it will appear on the site!