Prior to upgrading the site to Visual WebGui the user experience was lacking, including repeating unnecessary page refreshes. "With VWG I was able to create a fully ajax’ed site quickly without worrying about the typical issues," John Ruf.
Overview
MyTimelineOnline is a unique blogging website featuring advanced controls that allows users to document their life, or the life of a loved one and to share their collective experiences within their social network and with the world. MyTimelineOnline features a control originally designed by MIT and converted to .NET by Rob Chartier. The timeline view allows users to quickly navigate several years' worth of postings to explore what events occurred in their own life or the lives of others.
"Our mantra at MyTimelineOnline is, 'Everyone has a story to share...' I am a firm believer everyone has much to learn from the experiences of others. My biggest fear is that the memories of our elderly population will pass away without ever being recorded in a way that can be shared for generations to come," said founder John Ruf. MyTimelineOnline allows people all over the world to create their own autobiography and share it with friends and family.
Business needs
MyTimelineOnline.com was created to allow people to share their personal and family experiences in a chronological way which also allows learning about others' similar experiences and via MyTimelineOnline users will be able to search for dates where combined experiences relate.
The site should be based on a new blogging concept that is a chronologically blogging environment. According to this concept, users should be able to create a history of sequence of events that they find important, and show others how they relate or create the history of a company or document a project timeline.
It was important to create an Ajax based site which is easy to use with a professional looking social networking UI. In addition, the site had to respond quickly and smoothly to the users input even when the number of concurrent users increases. "I wanted options when it came to scalability that did not require a code rewrite," said John Ruf.
Moreover, it was needed to complete the project according to the requirements with a limited time and budget. As a matter of fact, there was only a single part time developer allocated for this project while creating an Ajax site could be a complex project combining JavaScript, HTML, CSS and C#.
It was therefore required to find an Ajax based solution that would provide a way to cost effectively create the required usability and visual style and at the same time present the responsiveness and performance that was sought.
The Solution
The site was originally developed by a single individual and technologies such as Telerik were considered and discarded due to the complexity and cost. Then, the entire site was rewritten by a single part time developer in Visual WebGui (VWG) which provided a significant increase in the usability of the site as well as the visual style. Visual WebGui was chosen since it was extremely easy to use & develop with and it also allowed rewriting pages written in other Ajax solutions very quickly. Additionally, Visual WebGui allowed focusing on usability since the Visual WebGui themes took care of the rest.
"Working with Visual WebGui was painless. Having worked with other Ajax solutions I would spend days working with JavaScript. I tweaked the order in which I Ajax'ed controls to get the desired functionality. With Visual WebGui I didn’t put a second thought toward how to Ajax a page, I could just trust that it just would be," John Ruf
Prior to upgrading the site to Visual WebGui the user experience was lacking, including repeating unnecessary page refreshes. "With VWG I was able to create a fully ajax’ed site quickly without worrying about the typical issues," said Ruf and added "With Visual WebGui statefull environment, I knew I would not have to worry about viewstate and session as much as I did in classic ASP.NET. I no longer worried if a variable had the proper value at the current stage of the page lifecycle. In fact I forgot all about the page lifecycle". All of these and its affordability made it easy to choose Visual WebGui when it came to MyTimelineOnline.
Benefits
Using Visual WebGui provided MyTimeLineOnline with a professional user friendly UI that was incredibly easy to create. "The site look like it was made by a team of professionals" said John Ruf and continued "I have no particular UI design skills and due to Visual WebGui I didn’t have to worry about the color scheme. The 6.4 preview 1 convinced me that soon I would have access to all manner of well thought out theme choices. While I am currently using VWG 6.3.9 with the XP theme that makes the site looks like it was polished by a UI expert I am anxious for the release of Visual WebGui 6.4 which includes more themes & customization options."
The Visual WebGui platform also allowed to create Ajax based site without having to worry about JavaScript or other typical Ajax related issues while providing a responsive user interface. The VWG’s statefull environment also allowed to focusing on the business logic which further contributed to shortening the development cycles. In addition, Visual WebGui scalability solutions enable to develop in Visual WebGui without having to worry about web server scalability if the user base became too much for one server to handle.
Eventually, Visual WebGui allowed MyTimeLineOnline to easily create a completely Ajax’ed site without costing over $500.
Screen shots
This is the main page for the application featuring the project timeline. This is how users are informed of the status of the site. Using the start button users can browse timelines, login, register, and have access many other features.
This is the browse timeline page. It allows users to browse other public timeline entries. Double-clicking a row here will load that user’s public timeline.
Once a user is logged in they can access the “Manage” button which allows the user to add timeline entries, manage friends, create embeddable timelines and have access to many other features. This screen shot shows a user adding a timeline entry for their own timeline. The “Add Timeline Entry” window pops up with the smoothness of a desktop application over the window behind. Users can add timeline entries that are only visible to them. Users also have the option to make timeline entries visible only to those they have added to their friends list. The third option is to make public timeline entries which everyone can see.
If a user wants to share their public timeline elsewhere, they can use the “Embeddable Timeline” feature. This creates “iframe” code that allows the user to share their public timeline on any site that allows “iframes.”