Rebuilding an impenetrible large website

8/12/2019

Finally the project to rebuild one of our largest Websites is a go.  But where to begin?  Some initial thoughts and ideas about how to ensure the resulting site is an improvement upon the complexity and impenetribility of the previous one.

So if you are familiar with where I currently work, it's not entirely too difficult to figure out the large website I refer to here - however for the sake of privacy I will refer to the site as 'The Site'.

When I joined the team responsible for the site - I did not have much experience in the way of ASP.Net applications or creating them.  In fact - those years ago I was completely unaware of .Net technology and how it worked.  As a result - The Site was an enigma to me - having been built specifically on asp.Net and Umbraco and then using an Umbraco package it utilised MVC methods in what was then called a 'hybrid framework.

Similarly the site had undergone several custom code projects such as with the search engine - that had been rewritten within the MVC framework and then left with absolutely no documentation - making the site extremely fragile and without any dev's having the faintest clue where to start in deconstricting it.

And the fragility of the site was a major concern.  There were too many features capable of breaking the site if it didn't work and the team didn't have the expertise to ensure those breaking features were not of concern.  To give you an example - whenever a site map was generated and placed in the root the site would break.

So now we've the task of rebuilding it from the ground up.  This is a huge opportunity for both the owners of the site as well as those working on it.  An overhaul has long been needed, but also the web has moved on since the site was built and there are a lot of good practise examples and techniques that can now be implemented to improve the workings of the site.  Here are a few:

Using Github Source Control

The pages in my documentation repo give an indication of how we're intending to move the site in the direction of good decent source control.  We're not ready for full integration yet - but since most of the concepts of github are fairly new to my employer workplace - using Github is a massive step in the right direction.

Using Gitflow

Similar to the above - not only are we incorporating github - but the intention is to adopt a git-flow process to make source control dev easier, better structured and more thorogh.  This is going to be the hardest aspect since it reaquires members of the team to get up to speed of working from a dev branch.

Adopting modular CSS

Adopting Modular based CSS