Can you describe your business?
PoshTots.com offers our products online on our website and through our expert design consultants here at our offices. Many of our products are created as unique treasures from our exclusive artisans and vendors.PoshTots.com offers one of the largest selections of upscale nursery and children's furnishings online. Design Consultants are available during normal business hours to assist customers with product questions as well as offer complimentary design advice for those seeking to design an entire nursery or just looking for that perfect accessory to compliment their nursery or child's room. Poshtots also puts out a print catalogue each year to attract new customers to the business. The catalogue is sent to the house file as well as perspective customers and those requesting a print catalogue from the website.
Why did you choose ASP.NET 2.0?
Having developed with ASP.NET since the first .NET Beta I have found the time to get websites and applications in production becomes faster with each version. We decided that the new 3.5 technologies such as LINQ and new ASP.NNET 3.5 controls allowed us to get the PoshTots.com up and running quickly, so we re-designed the website on the .NET platform, which previously was on the classic ASP platform.
How did ASP.NET AJAX help you improve your user experience?
On many of the website pages we were able to use partial page updates, instead of refreshing the entire page, allowing the customer to move quicker through our product catalog and other features of the site.
What ASP.NET AJAX features did you take advantage of?
We use the Update Panel on our Product Catalog pages to page, sort, and view all products on the catalog pages, which is the main engine of our site. We use a History control with the Update Panel that returns the customer to their last viewed products when returning to a catalog page. We plan on very soon replacing this History control with the new 3.5 History control that was recently released. The Modal Popup is used to display the larger image of our products and product options. We also use the Update Panel to process our login, newsletter submission, and other forms throughout the site. In our registry, we compress the details of products to display more products. We use the Collapsible Panel control to expand the additional product details as customers want to view the information.
What other Microsoft technologies does your site use?
SQL Server 2005. Team Foundation server to manage our projects, tasks, testing, bugs, and builds. We are planning to release an interactive online catalog in Silverlight where customers can flip through our PoshTots catalog as if they were viewing the catalog at home. .NET Window Forms to run our processes with our vendors and other business partners.
Anything else you want to add?
Now that PoshTots.com is on the .NET platform we are adding new features to the site each week, with a focus on providing the customer with more ideas and options for furnishing their Tots rooms and wardrobes. We have potential plans to include interactive designer rooms to see products in rooms, with plans to use Ajax in the solution. We may use Silverlight Deep Zoom to allow customers to zoom into product images. Also, in the near future we will be launching a new website, PoshTweens.com, on the same code base as PoshTots.com.