Convention Centre Website

[tophers]

This was my first big project in CMSMS - a new website for the local convention centre here in Calgary. The only Module added on is the Album Module, and we did some customization of the Menu template to accommodate the graphics on the first level (though in hindsight I'd tackle that a different way). Their Calendar is still a bit clunky, since they need to pull in their own system, and haven't been fully trained on its use. All in all a good project - the client is pleased, and they have several people in charge of content. One warning - their hosting service is SLOW! We're in the midst of setting them up with a new company.

Calgary TELUS Convention Centre - http://www.calgary-convention.com/

[calguy1000]

if their hosting service is TELUS (and I bet it is.... didn't even bother to look) it's a dog.

[tophers]

You nailed it - they're with TELUS, which is actually just a coincidence, not part of the naming agreement. Apparently wait times of 10-20 seconds are acceptable with the hosting plan they're on. We're looking into options for them right now.

[levinho]

Sorry, it's just unbearably slow. The graphics seem to be nice, though...

[JeremyBASS]

Funny loaded extremely fast for me... and I'm at least 6 bounces away.

Question what is the trick you did for the left side menu on the last one... I can think of 3 ways to do it off the top of my head.. but they are hack ways...

anyways... nifty looking...
jeremyBass

[tophers]

Thanks - it was definitely a learning process, but convinced me that CMSMS was the best tool for most of my client's sites.

The menu modification was all in the CSS. For all but the last menu item I used (abbreviated here to show the differences):
#planners ul ul,#attendees ul ul ,#facility ul ul ,#services ul ul ,#destination ul ul  {
  left: 100%;
}
And for the last item, to move the flyout to the right so it fit in the viewing window, I used:
#about ul ul {
  right: 100%;
}

Then just a few specific rules to alter the arrows to use the left arrow instead of the right arrow (here's one of the first ones):
#about ul li.menuparent,
#about ul li.menuparent:hover,
#about ul li.menuparenth {
/* arrow for menuparents */
  background-image: url(images/cms/arrow-left.gif);
  background-position: center left;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

[JeremyBASS]

Rock on I thought that might be the case... Didn't know if you built it in the template as and if type deal... looks good...

Jeremy

[levinho]

I checked again, the loading times are fine now.

[nhaack]

Hi,

nice and clean looking site. Good play with the typo. I would add alternative texte for the images (accessibility and SEO) - but that's mainly it. According to charles, page is on my PC (Germany) roughly after 0.5 seconds. That is well acceptable I think.

Best regards
Nils

[skypanther]

Nice site design. I would have used the sectionimage tag for the left-side graphics rather than hacking the menu code. Or maybe I misunderstood. Speaking of menu graphics...the little arrows showing submenus shift left a pixel when you roll over the menu item. A minor quibble of course. Site loaded pretty quickly for me.

Tim

[tophers]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. This was my first big site in the CMS, and it's showing some of my shortcomings as a newbie. Hopefully I'm getting better as I learn the ins and outs of the system.

skypanther, I agree - the sectionimage tag would have been a better solution, and I've used it on subsequent sites. When we do a site-wide maintenance it's on my to-do list.

nhaack - good call on the alt tags. We had multiple contributors, and need to run through the site and clean up the code. Thanks for testing the speed - we get widely varying access times for this one, and you seem to have caught it on a good day.

[nhaack]

Hi tophers,

I had the same issue with varying page delivery times - with partly ridiculous variances (between 15 and 0.25 seconds). Having DB and CMS hosted on physically different machines can also have a big impact on the page times (quite common for shared web-host environments).

I moved over to another hosting plan at another provider and had big improvements. It's a little more expensive but they have less customers per machine and better DB servers.

Have you tried such things as full-site caching or so?

Best
Nils

[steje40]

I am from Germany,
the Website load very fast here.

Cool Job.

Jens

[coreman]

One warning - their hosting service is SLOW! We're in the midst of setting them up with a new company.

Calgary TELUS Convention Centre - http://www.calgary-convention.com/

maybe you need use VPS

[lucid]

seems to load pretty quickly from Australia. Not that many people would look at the site from here.