Celestron
I built Celestron.com entirely in ASP.NET MVC in the Umbraco CMS using C# razor syntax. To speed up load times, all pages use MVC donut caching. I opted to use donut caching rather than the built-in output caching, because some elements of the page are dynamic on a per-user basis (e.g., the shopping cart indicates the number of items in the cart). Some interesting aspects I built for the site include:
- Several hundred products are available for purchase. I built this e-commerce capability from scratch and integrated with the Shopatron API for the order fulfillment and payment processing.
- The telescope finder uses a questionnaire to guide users to the right telescope for them.
- The dealer locator makes use of a web service I built that returns dealers near a location.
- Aside from responsive layouts, the site also has responsive behaviors. For example, clicking “Show More” on a mobile device will show a few more items, but the same button on a desktop will show all remaining items.
- All menus are fully editable in the CMS. Even sub-items in the products menu that can link to the telescope finder, which is itself an editable item in the products menu.
- Images are automatically resized on the server to reduce image size and to resize them appropriately for responsive views.
- Built a product search into the backend so editors can jump effortlessly between products for a quick and seamless editing experience.
- Setup a reverse proxy so legacy components (e.g., the knowledge base) can exist on another server, but be served as part of the main site.
