Business Continuity Portal Design

I posted about the Business Continuity Portal project i’ve been working on for the last 4 months. This project is about creating an entry point for Business Continuity issues. The last post was talking about the wireframe of the sites. At this time project is still going on and i would say that i’m really enjoying working with ASP .Net despite a lot of wired error regarding the beta version of this framework.

Now i’m still programing the profile framework for the user. There are some things that i want to share about the development processes and some great stuffs from ASP .Net, but let see the design of the site first. The design is based on the brandville guidelines for web site within Siemens, and once again i used the XHTML - CSS, but this only as much as i could due to some XHTML-codes that generated by the .Net framework which are sometimes a bit difficult to control.

The Homepage

The homepage is quite simple and should give the visitor an overview of what they can find on the other pages.

Login and Members Page

The log in page is used the login-control of ASP .Net and this save me sometimes. The log in mechanism uses the membership features of ASP .Net which makes the user administration much easier. I was having a bit hard times when i was trying to create a custom membership provider, but at the end i found a solution and it works great.

The members page are role-based. I have created two roles: admin and normaluser. If an admin log in, he will land on the admin page with the customized navigation and features. I know you can do that with all kind of programing languages, but what i saw on ASP .Net and Visual Web Developer 2005 is really new for me. Basically you create the members page by creating different templates for different user or role and it allows you to create that using a WYSIWYG editor, yeah i like that much much better than using notepad or code-only editor, i mean why should i wasting some times if i can do the tasks with a better editor.

The BIA Pages

The purpose of this section is to gather the information needed regarding the Business Continuity from the manager or head of business unit. So it contains many formulars that need to be filled out. Web formular and how it is processed is one of the major improvement of ASP .Net. It streamlines a lot of works to validate and store the data into the database.

So that is all for now, i’ll return again to share my experiences from this project.