Celestron

I built Celestron.com entirely in ASP.NET MVC in the Umbraco CMS using C# razor syntax. To speed up load times, all pages use MVC donut caching. I opted to use donut caching rather than the built-in output caching, because some elements of the page are dynamic on a per-user basis (e.g., the shopping cart indicates the number of items in the cart). Chris Guadarrama came up with the awesome design for the 500 error page you see below. Some interesting aspects I built for site include:

• Several hundred products are available for purchase. I built this e-commerce capability from scratch and integrated with the Shopatron API for the order fulfillment and payment processing.
• The telescope finder uses a questionnaire to guide users to the right telescope for them.
• The dealer locator makes use of a web service I built that returns dealers near a location.
• Aside from responsive layouts, the site also has responsive behaviors. For example, clicking "Show More" on a mobile device will show a few more items, but the same button on a desktop will show all remaining items.
• All menus are fully editable in the CMS. Even sub-items in the products menu that can link to the telescope finder, which is itself an editable item in the products menu.
• Images are automatically resized on the server to reduce image size and to resize them appropriately for responsive views.
• Built a product search into the backend so editors can jump effortlessly between products for a quick and seamless editing experience.
• Setup a reverse proxy so legacy components (e.g., the knowledge base) can exist on another server, but be served as part of the main site.