The key objective of this project was to perform a design and technology refresh of the legacy codebase that supported both of these sites. The code had been maintained by multiple previous developers over a number of years, and had begun to perform poorly and suffer from reduced search rankings in key areas.
The code presented some challenges, as it was handed over with no documentation and had grown organically to serve multiple countries and multiple domains, with business logic that had become complex as a result.
The old design was replaced with a responsive design implemented using Bootstrap. Behind the scenes, a number of technologies were updated to the latest versions, including .NET and jQuery, and the data access layer was modified to improve overall performance.
We also took the opportunity to remove outdated third party components in favour of using ASP.NET's built-in functionality. This change allowed us to simplify a number of aspects of the code to make future maintenance easier, and to offer new functionality to the customer in terms of URL structure and page accessibility to improve search engine rankings.
Along with the refresh we also updated the code to allow it to run as an Azure web app, which enabled us to use Azure's Australian geographical region. This provided the customer with an opportunity to save on hosting costs, and also to shift the site's hosting to a location that is closer to their target customers.