Seablick Consulting - Advanced DotNetNuke Services

Digicon Bets on DNN Ecommerce 

Damien Wittmack, head of marketing at Digicon recently announced on Twitter the launch of an ecommerce site build on DotNetNuke. As DNN stores continue to be a controversial topic, I thought it would be great to get some input directly from the “trenches.”

1. Thanks for making time for this interview. First of all, please introduce yourself and Digicon.

   
   Hi, I’m Nick Jaco, one of the founders of Digicon. I’m an expatriate Canadian, enjoying life in Australia. Digicon is a web design firm based in Brisbane, Australia. We’ve been around since 1996 and have seen a few changes in the Internet along the way. Digicon primarily services Australian clients, but have worked with overseas companies as well.

2. When and how did Digicon get involved with DotNetNuke and what specific DNN products and services does the company offer?

   
   

   Digicon, like many other web design companies had built its own CMSs (.Net, ColdFusion, PERL & J2EE versions), but felt there must be a better way. It didn’t make sense that a million web companies globally should each be spending development resources on proprietary CMSs. Reviewing the open source CMS market at the time (about four years ago), DotNetNuke came up a winner. While there are more choices available today, we’re happy with DNN and just see the DNN story getting better and better. DotNetNuke has changed the way we solve customer problems. Frequently, it’s a matter of consulting and integration rather than application development. Even for standalone web applications, we’ll often start with a DNN base as it gives us a security model and CMS functionality out-of-the-box.

   Digicon offers a variety of DotNetNuke services: consulting, design, application development and hosting.

3. Digicon just launched wallrocks.com.au. Please give us an overview of the project and your general thoughts about ecommerce on DotNetNuke.

   
   

   The project went quite smoothly as Wallrocks Antiques was great to work with. One of the challenges was to display the details of the antiques in sufficient quality for potential customers to evaluate. Originally we looked at the Deep Zoom with Silverlight, but were concerned about the penetration of the Silverlight player. Then we came across this nice little Flash product by the name of Zoomify, which did the job quite well.

   We believe that DotNetNuke is well suited for ecommerce. DNN has good user/roles functionality and is secure and robust.

4. The Wallrocks online store runs on DNN and the Catalook module suite. Why did you choose Catalook over other ecommerce modules?

   
   Catalook is a very good DNN store – quite powerful and a rich feature set. However, Catalook can be intimidating at first, because it has so many features that require configuration. It handles real-time payment verification, downloadable products, booking for seminars, member subscriptions and the list goes on.

5. How did the Catalook installation and configuration go? Did you customize the Catalook and / or DNN core codebase in any way?

   
   Catalook installation went fine. No significant customization of either the DNN or Catalook codebase was required. As mentioned above, we integrated in Zoomify to zoom in on product images. Most of the work came down to skinning.

6. I have to say that wallrocks.com.au is the best looking Catalook implementation I’ve seen in a long time. Please share your experience skinning the module.

   
   

   Thanks very much! Wallrocks Antiques was great to work with from a design point of view, which really made our job much easier.

   I guess Digicon takes a different approach for both DotNetNuke and Catalook skinning. We have a focus on design and SEO, though we’re not absolute purists. We always custom build skins to achieve the right look. Because we custom build, we avoid the SolPartMenu and instead use our own menu module. By starting fresh, it’s actually easier to build a useable site, instead of fighting against some of the standard components.

7. Where do you see the future for ecommerce and DotNetNuke?

   
   I’m quite optimistic for DotNetNuke ecommerce. What was quite complicated years ago seems much easier now. The vendor community around DotNetNuke has matured and the product offerings have become more sophisticated. Prices have also gone up for modules, which is actually a good thing as there are skilled software developers making a living from their modules. And that in turn benefits us all. Catalook is a great example - for US $99 you get a fully functioning store. The future will bring us more options, more business and more DotNetNuke.

Comments

Name (required)

Email (will not be published) (required)

Website

Enter the code shown above in the box below

Notify me of follow-up comments via email.