Snow revisited

Quick thanks to the team at PowerDNN (now with a UK presence) after an online support session for sledges.co.uk. The legacy DotNetNuke installation is at an impasse with the version of ASPDotNetStoreFront and issues arise, unsurprisingly when the website is being hammered with online sales. Thankfully the website was only offline for a few minutes...

Sleigh bells ringing

Looking forward to the new year at Callisti - a number of new projects to get stuck into and we're pleased to say our customers have been enjoying a good year. We have a new ecommerce site about to launch but the news of the day is surely the performance of Sledges, the Aviemore based retailer, since we organised professional DotNetNuke hosting and updated the site to a more stable version.

Traffic and sales are escalating wildly, even just the mention of snow on a UK weather forecast has an impact on visitors to the site, and this month online sales have hit a record high in the website's history. The month's not over yet but there may be a tail-off as the last order cut-off for Christmas 2009 delivery approaches.

Historically the sales and visitors rise again in the new year as demand for sledges is very much winter weather dependent and Scotland won't be short of that in the coming months.

Sledges Upgraded

On 9th September 2009, Joe Brinkman from DotNetNuke Corporation announced that the DotNetNuke 4.x product line had officially reached its End-Of-Life.

The DotNetNuke Corporation is no longer providing support or patches for the 4.x product line, but PowerDNN have assisted Callisti in the upgrade of sledges.co.uk from v4.8.4 to the more stable v4.9.5, and will continue to provide their high level of support.

Callisti will be looking at moving to v5.x next year but will have to check for potential issues with the legacy version on ASPDotNetStoreFront currently employed by the sledges website.

Sledges

Callisti's sojourn into the world of DotNetNuke was precipitated by a transfer by a former Dodgy Till client and we are happy to take on board the Aviemore-based outdoor shop.

The client has a number of skis, snowboards and sledges websites to server customers in the UK and Europe. Traffic to the sites peak generally in January/February with steady traffic in the winter months and a lower average usage during the summer. Not rocket surgery, really...

We have chosen a US hosting company who specialise in DNN hosting and their support team has been very proactive in servicing us as a new client.