Creativity not enough to meet technical needs for Sweetspot.ca 29 July, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

"I am not a technical person and I trust what others are telling me & [and] unfortunately, I learned the hard way," said Joanna Track, publisher and founder of Sweetspot.ca Inc.

She added that the initial company she tasked was more of a creative agency that recommended Joomla!, a PHP-based Content Management System (CMS).

"They didn't do a good enough assessment of our business to understand the day-to-day operational needs with our CMS," Track said. "It didn't take us very long to figure out it wasn't working for us at all and we needed to get more serious about the technology side and not that [the site] looks pretty."

One of the problems that Sweetspot.ca encountered with Joomla! was that it would not let them schedule things to be published.

"We create so much content every day and [out editorial staff] are not technically savvy, therefore people had to wake up early in the morning or stay-up late at night to post something live, for us. Our content is published on a certain timely basis and we don't want it up too early or too late so without a scheduling function, people had to manually publish at certain times," Track explained.

Trioro Inc. a Toronto-based Internet technology agency, was then tasked by Sweetspot.ca to help them with their website. Coincidentally, Trioro originally answered Sweetspot.ca's request for proposal for a new website.

"We were proposing a custom solution using [Microsoft] .NET but at the time it wasn't a right fit," said Scott Snowden, partner with Trioro. "But then we got another call three to four months later that [Sweetspot.ca's Joomla! CMS] was way too restrictive and wanted us to come back and help."

Trioro is in the process of helping Sweetspot.ca move over from Joomla! to a .NET environment and one of the challenges that Snowden encountered was integrating the two together.

"We [are gradually moving them] to a Microsoft platform by making it work with the system [they] currently have," he added.

Snowden said that Trioro will be using .NET to build web applications in order to make Sweetspot.ca more than just a static website. Driving that website is a whole backend database built on SQL Server 2005 and a CMS that will allow staff to manage, control and follow the workflow of the website.

Even though complete transition to a .NET environment won't be complete until September, Track has already seen improvements such as her team becoming more efficient. As well, once complete, the transition will also make the lives of their readers easier.

She explained that with Joomla! the search function on Sweetspot.ca was "dreadful" where it was impossible to find information of the latest trends or where to go for dinner in a certain area of a city. As founder of the company, Track had to go to a competitive site to search for this information, which was not good for Sweetspot.ca.

"The only negative feedback [we got] from readers was our site was so hard to navigate," Track noted.

In the future, Track said that Sweetspot.ca will be using .NET to develop Web 2.0 technology for the site to include blogging, videos and profiles that readers can build.