Last Year I was asked, by the company I work for (Guy Robertson Partnership), to upgrade the Scotblood websites Session and Location Finder to be more flexible and detailed in the information that they provide.
The original Session Finder displayed a simple map and the locations with a list of sessions and their locations. My job was to add functionality that would allow users to enter their postcode or location (in much the same way as google/yahoo or msn maps) in order to find the closest Blood Donor Locations and the Sessions that are available in those locations. This also included condensing the results to Group Locations with their dates and times, rather than showing the locations separately (which produced lengthier results).
Click image to enlarge . . .
Click image to enlarge . . .
Each location uses AJAX controls with UpdatePanel to dynamically show the available sessions when requested. This helped to keep the size of the results list down to a minimum.
The Future
The Scotblood website was original built in classic ASP with very little control over the content of the website from the client’s point of view. A few months ago I created a new Scotblood website completely built in Umbraco CMS, which includes custom built CMS sections for the Session and Location Finder and Publications Sections.
Related:
(Coming Soon: Tutorial on How to create Custom Sections in umbraco.)
