I’ve been working the last several months to revamp a SharePoint 2003 intranet site, building it anew in SharePoint 2010. The design work was done by a local (to St. Louis) firm called Paradigm. Here are the before and after shots:

Before:
Up to Speed Before

Things like the weather were only displayed as links to Weather.com. There was virtually nothing dynamic about the site, other than the display of several items from Announcement lists.

After:
Up to Speed After

Some custom features of the site:

  • List-driven web parts. The top area of the page is a slide deck that utilizes JQuery to fade in and out between images. This web part is driven from a custom SharePoint list, which in turn utilizes images stored in the local Images library of the site. The same idea goes for the carousel of videos in the pink section of the page near the bottom of the screen.
  • RESTful Web Parts. In this case, we aren’t talking about SharePoint’s REST, but RESTful data coming from Yahoo!, which is being used to display local weather and the current stock price. The weather web part taps into Active Directory to determine the user’s zip code, then writes that value to a cookie to reduce the number of hits to AD.
  • Content Query Web Parts. Fairly typically, the news on the homepage is being driven by a custom-styled content query web part that retrieves news stories.
  • Site Map. Since this is a publishing site, I had to make special use of the PortalSiteMapProvider to retrieve relevent pages and navigation nodes to display in the site map, since the “regular” site map provider used in SPF sites wouldn’t work with the publishing site.

Other than that, most of the site was built using fairly standard WCM practices.

[Sorry the screenshots are so small. Since these are internal sites, I don’t want to show any sensitive content.]