Client:
Services Provided:
- Website Design/Maintenance
Background:
The concept of eRacer Garage is an internet based resource center for simulator racing related hardware. The site is intended to serve as a hub for the sim racing community, with a focus on the hardware side of the sport. It will provide online news, reviews, how to's, along with interactive discussion forums.
The ideal of the site was developed to help consolidate the information currently available on the web around the topic, making a central location for users to find and share information.
Solution:
To provide for the needs of eRacer Garage, it was decided that a portal style site would provide the best set of features. The IBUYSPY portal sample was used as the basis for the site.
One the major design goals of the site was the ease of maintenance. As it is a resource center with links and news that changes dynamically the ability to add and edit content was a driving factor. Over time it is planned that members will be able to access and create content directly, without the need of daily site administrator involvement. The IBUYSPY portal provides this ability through its use of user roles and security that can be tied to individual site pages and page elements.
By utilizing the existing IBUYSPY portal, a solid proven core could quickly and easily be put in place. The IBUYSPY portal also had a large user community which provided a great support base as well as a community building add on components to help extend the core feature set. With eRacer Garage the goal was to use cutting edge technologies such as ASP.NET but without reinventing the wheel; IBUYSPY offered this out of the box.
The stock IBUYSPY code was further extended with components to allow items such as the listing of books, and dynamic web based HTML content creation. Over time additional components and features will be integrated into the site, both in house developed and 3rd party.
In addition to the portal component, a discussion forum was also developed for the site. Again a proven code base that have been used used on the CORL website was reused for eRacer. This time the forums however were tied to a SQL Server backend to provide a more robust database.
Technologies/Tools:
- ASP
- ASP.NET
- HTML
- MS FrontPage
- MS Visual Studio .NET
- MS SQL Server
- Paintshop Pro
- Windows 2000 Server/IIS