Project Overview

Aurecon approached NML to take over the support of their exiting public facing Sitecore website in 2011. NML had already worked with Aurecon on other various projects before that, and were very excited to have the opportunity to work with them as a partner in yet another aspect of their business. Since then we have continued to support, maintain and add features to their website. Most recently however we completed a full overhaul of the front end of the website.

The original version of the site that we took over was not mobile friendly and so we recently embarked on a project to fully redesign the front end using a mobile first, responsive approach. The new version, which we launched recently, is fully responsive.  

Not only was NML responsible for the redesign, html, css and implementation of the new front end, but we also overhauled the back-end, redesigning the data templates and improving the overall structure of the existing content so that it is now both more robust and easier for content editors to use.

Key Features and Technology

• Sitecore 8.2 Experience Platform
• SQL Server
• ASP.NET MVC
• Lucene.Net
• Sitecore development
• Fully responsive front end
• Robust content structure, whereby elements such as sidebars, navigation, banners, etc. can be turned on and off for each and every page
• Reusable content blocks that can be used across multiple pages
• Flexible landing pages which allow content editors to pick and choose from available content blocks to build up the page
• Public participation section whereby public users can register, login and access information about various Aurecon projec
• Multi regional and the ability to show or hide content based on location

Architecture

The server architecture for this particular implementation consists of 2 Production Servers hosted in Australia. The Content Delivery Instance is hosted on a web server separate from the Content Management Instance. The Content Management Server acts as both a web server and the database server.

Even though there is only 1 Content Delivery Server, it therefore isn't scaled horizontally across multiple Content Delivery instances via a load balancer, however if the need arises, adding a load balancer and a second content delivery Server would be easy enough.

Design

NML worked with the Aurecon design team to produce a modern, responsive web site that showcases Aurecon as a cutting edge engineering company with a global presence.