Welcome to our newly designed website which we’ve worked hard on to try and bring a new fresh feel to our company’s on-line presence.
While our old site served us well (pictured below), it hadn’t received any real design updates in over three years and we thought the time had come for a fresh version. You can see the old site below (which was based on a template from Open Source Web Design).
Open Solutions' Old Website (replaced August 2010)
We’ve also created a WordPress template for our blog so that it integrates seamlessly into the site and added feeds from the blog to the home page and the news page in the hope of keeping the on-line content fresh!
Over the coming weeks and months we hope to continue to add new content through the blog and to also update some of the static pages. We intend to do this through both in depth case studies of solutions we created as well as posts explaining some of what we do in greater detail.
Under the Hood
For those of you interested, we’ve used the following to create this site:
- The Zend Framework for:
- the Zend Controller;
- the Zend Application boot strapping;
- the Zend Logger; and
- the Zend feed reader (to pull information from our blog).
- Smarty, the PHP templating engine;
- JQuery, the JavaScript library for the home page transitions and menu; and
- Yahoo’s YUI CSS reset packages (Reset CSS, Base CSS and Fonts) to ensure a consistent cross browser look.
The above may seem like overkill for a primarily static website, but as we develop many web applications on this framework it was very easy for us to create the structure around which we entered the content. We also plan to migrate some different online portals we have to this new infrastructure where upon the above framework will be essential.
The site is served from a Linux server (LAMP stack) running as a Xen unprivileged domain on one of our Dell PowerEdge R710 boxes.
We plan a case study on a web application we developed soon in which we’ll go into greater detail on the framework we use.
![[IPv6 Ready]](http://2-badges.ipv6ready.ie/2/78/bf/5e/278bf5ecf363226a72b2ac768872fa0d2171c542-l.png)
Just out of interest, If the blog part is being powered by wordpress why did you go to the extent of using the zend framework for the rest of the site?
Could you not of just setup wordpress with a static front page and posts page then create all the other pages you need based on a custom page template? I might be completely wrong here but it sounds as if you did more work than required.
Duffy, thanks for the comment and congratulations on being the first!
The answer to your question is actually in the post:
We could have done exactly as you say and WordPress is a fantastic piece of software but we have greater plans for the site and already had all the code we needed for the framework. I also think it’s important that we eat our own dog food!