About this Site

This site was built by our own team using the tools that we sell, develop on and support for our Clients world wide. We have received many requests about the site and also have been mentioned in various blogs and articles and so we created this short writeup to help others that may be considering the same type of strategy.

The Motivation

We wanted to update our website to be built upon the technologies that we sell and promote to our customers. Our previous website was built upon Java/JSP's and was mainly static. It did have a wiki portion to the site, but the site itself did not reside in the wiki.

The building of the new site was a project that was completed within a month by a small team working on it in spare time between projects. Which was quite surprising, normally these types of projects are a guaranteed Death March.

The Strategy

Our specific strategy with approaching this project was to be realistic. So we made it quite small. We had an existing site, rather than try and redesign the entire site in one swoop (and involving too many people), we had one simple goal:

• Convert the current website to be a wiki, retaining the existing look and feel

This goal enabled and ensured a few things:

• The technical team did not have to continually ask questions to the marketing team. The scope was fixed - if it existed on the old site, it needed to be exactly the same on the new one
• We wanted the site to look like a website, not a wiki. Every other site that we saw that was built on top of a wiki looked like a wiki, or looked as though it was designed by a wiki guru. Having this scoped forced the team to prove that the website built on a wiki could look exactly like a website.

This fits in well with our general approach of listening and responding to the business, rather than providing a technical solution just because it is buzzword compliant.

After we completed the exercise, we spent a short time to modify the front page to be more informative and we were then in a position to make use of the features of the infrastructure - rss feeds, blogs, etc etc. There is more to come, this is just the beginning!

The Technical Bits

The site is built upon Atlassian Confluence and makes use of a custom theme from Adaptavist.
CustomWare did develop some custom macros to assist with form submission and [integration] with our backend CRM.

More info

Please do contact us and we can assist you to make a site that offers the same capabilities.

Thanks & Kudos

Thanks to Jonathan, Stafford, Ben, Nanik, Roger, YC/Kumar from the CW team for their varied contributions to realise this project.