New Media Labs was chosen to do the development for Nedgroup Investments’ new content management system (CMS) and public-facing website. Nedgroup wanted a fresh and simple yet informative site, with an intelligent CMS system to replicate and support their business model i.e. fund information, news articles, media etc.
- Nedgroup Site Home Page
We chose to use the ASP.Net MVC 1.0 Framework because it satisfied most of our requirements, both for the CMS and the site. The look and feel for the website was designed and created by Stonewall+ and this HTML was seamlessly plugged into our MVC view as soon as it was supplied. We used SQL Server and Linq for the data access.
Navigation
The navigation for the site was driven by a SiteMapProvider with all the nodes being managed in the CMS. There were certain rules around the nodes i.e. Certain nodes cannot be removed or unpublished; nodes can only be published if their parent is published etc. The sidebar and breadcrumb navigation on the site is dynamically generated from the SiteMapProvider.
CMS Item Workflow
The following content types:
- List of Fund Items
- Generic Content
- Person
- Fund
- Media
incorporate the following features:
- Publishing workflow
- Item Creation
- Item Approval
- Item Publishing
- Item Archiving
- Email notifications
- Versioning
- Featured Item
Only certain user roles can perform the different workflow steps, with an over-seeing administrator role which can perform any of the tasks. Once the item moves to the next status, an email is sent to the relevant parties to inform them and provide a direct link for them to action.
Each item has an Effective From and Effective To date, so you can easily set an item to only appear on the live site from a certain date, or until a certain date.
A versioning system is in place which allows a currently published item to be edited, without affecting the actual live item, until the new version is approved and published, at which stage the “old” version will fall away.
Each of these content types also allows for linking to media items such as newsletter PDFs, promotional video clips, fund fact sheets, etc. Our link selector tool allows you to create an association to already-uploaded media (done via the Media Manager)
You can also feature an item in the CMS (Fund or Media) and that item will immediately appear on the home page of the website in the featured item boxes.
 Creating a new user |
A user can either be an Administrator, or any of the other options or combinations thereof. More roles can obviously be added depending on the business requirement. |
 Media Manager |
Administrators can upload files via the Media Manager, and these files can then be linked to the content items.The administrator can add and remove folders to allow for easier file storage management. |
Website Screenshots
- Domestic Fund Selector
- Complete Domestic Fund Listing
 Investment Principles |
 Executive Committee Listing |
 Fund Detail |
 News |
| Go see it for yourself here: Nedgroup Investments |
Things we learned
After the site went live we discovered an interesting Linq bug. Turns out the Load Testing slipped through our QA’s net! We learned very quickly to make sure this doesn’t happen again…
Next time we’ll also make sure we implement the latest and greatest version of the SiteMapProvider for MVC. The version we used didn’t seem to refresh the nodes properly and so we spent far too much time on it than it deserved!
One Response to “NML builds content management system and new website for Nedgroup Investments”
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- Looking Back to Project Forward – A two and a half year retrospective | New Media Labs - [...] NML develops the CMS to illustrate Nedgroup Investments’ business model of fund management. Read about the development process here – ...
It doesn't happen to often to come over such an article. Although there's no actual code, you described the entire site building process starting with the idea and ending with the online fully functional version. I also appreciate the final paragraph, the one with what you learned in the meantime. It's a valuable lesson for everyone who wishes to build their own online presence. Thank you for sharing your experience with us!
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Mathew Farney – web hosting