I’ve left this blog to last, not because it’s the last part of the jigsaw puzzle, but because it’s the most important piece.  When it comes to security AcuWeb has some ground breaking features that are going to make it a dream for 3rd parties to integrate to, whilst maintaining the ease of use that is a core design feature.

I like to think blogs are like London busses, you wait ages for one and then a whole host come at once.  I’m sorry about that, it’s just about prioritisation, keeping everyone informed is right up there for me, but so is doing boring Chief Exec work, like kissing babies and shaking hands (to be honest it’s really only the latter, but hey I’m not complaining!)

Sure, you want AcuWeb because it gives you a web booking engine out of the box for your shiny new installation of Acumen 9.  But did you know it gives you as many web booking engines as you want?  No?  Well it does.

Obviously we’re talking a lot about AcuWeb at the moment as it races towards it’s beta release, but AcuWeb is only half the story.  We made a commitment to Kelworth customers that we were serious about Accoman/Accowin and we meant it, which is why we’ve also been working hard on Acumen 9, the new version of the system that has the horsepower to drive AcuWeb.

There’s lots of new features under the hood of AcuWeb that are designed to make your life so much easier.  The one we’re most proud of is the way you get pictures onto the website, and how you maximise the impact of your property pictures.

We started the fit out work at the Windsor Works on Monday 18th May, and I thought it would be a great idea to share some photographs of the progress as we go.  Seeing as I have to go onsite every couple of days, I take the opportunity to snap a few pictures.  As most people are never going to see the site in it’s ‘raw’ form, they might appreciate being able to see the transformation in progress!

One of the biggest challenges facing small companies is maintaining their website.  The ability to manipulate HTML directly is not a common skill set, nor should it be.  For that reason, most companies engage a web development company to produce and publish their website.  In many cases, that’s where the relationship ends, and that flashy new website quickly starts to age and the Google ranking quickly deteriorates as the content becomes increasingly less relevant.

Whether or not you class yourself as an I.T. professional, really depends on how many progress bars you sit and watch.  At least it certainly seems like it having seen a fair few of them in my years.  On the plus side it beats the old shrill whine of a tape deck rewinding to the start.

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.