CrownCastle

January 1st, 2007

Developer

Michael Krotscheck

Designer

Ed Shin

Project Manager

Mark Kubaska

Information Architect

Rob Miller

Crowncastle is the largest owner of transmission towers in the United States. With their purchase of American Tower, they were interested in reimagining their rather outdated web presence and offering conversion opportunity for their software package: CCISites. As always we presented them with several design options (My preferred version, visible here wasn’t selected) and then moved to production.

This was my first real .Net 2.0 project, and I dove in with gusto. The learning curve wasn’t exactly fun, but with prewrapped sitemap management and some simple menu routines (I wrote my own menu frontend renderer) it went well enough. Thinking of a page-based environment as an event-driven application came easily, but in the end such things are better handled in AJAX where the entire application isn’t still hamstrung by the page metaphor.

In retrospect, the .Net application framework is great if you’re simply intersted in basic fucntionality, quickly. Once the complexity shifts from “site” to “application”, the advantages quickly evaporate.