OK, so I find something cool, in this case Atlas, the AJAX framework for .NET 2.0 and I jump right in and start wasting precious time.

Time to slow things down. I need to figure out exaclty what I want this system to do, how it should work. So in an effort to do so I need to figure out the objectives:

• The resulting site must be search engine friendly
• The pages must be editable in a wysiwyg style
• .NET (goes without saying I guess)
• AJAX where possible and appropriate (Just because I haven’t really built much with AJAX before)
• Flexible navigation management

The search engine friendly part is probably one of the more important objectives. Most content management systems I’ve seen have some odd mechanism of producing URLs. Like http://www.yadayada.com/index.asp?id=118273&sec=home. Horrendous to say the list. The issue is two-fold, the first being that it is filled with parameters and the second being that is doesn’t allow for any keywords in the url. An example of a good url is something liek http://www.newagestore.com/free/tarot . Google likes it and users like it.

The closest I’ve seen to this is dotnetnuke which has the ability to replace the parameters with slashes, however it only solves one part of the problem, the urls are still not pretty.

One thing that has also struck me which I find missing in alot of content management systems is a true testing environment. It would be nice to be able to ‘publish’ the output to a test site, play with it and make sure it works, prior to pushing it out to the real world.

newagestore.com gets 2.5 million page views per month across almost 200,000 visitors. What this means is that it’s more important now than ever to ‘get it right first time’ when dealing with content.