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Hi all,
First post and I'm looking for some advice on the path to follow for a site I'll be building, or at least responsible for.
This is essentially an automobile dealer website. The initial site will have a home page, new and used inventory pages, along with pages for the service and parts departments. Vehicle inventory will be fairly large and rotating at a quick pace, so the ability to dynamically build the inventory overview and detail pages will be a big plus.
The new inventory pages will need to be more like online brochures, but with links to in stock detail. The used landing page will be more like an overview gallery which will link to detail pages. I picture the new and used detail pages to be the same layout.
Longer term we might be adding an online store for parts and accessories, a customer image gallery, events pages, forum, etc. Building more of a community within the site.
Those longer-term objectives make me gravitate toward a portal or CMS framework like DotNetNuke or Joomla!, but that may not be the best way to go. I'd like to have some really cool features within the site like cascading menus, mouse-over image galleries, CSS popups for vehicle detail, and maybe accordion inventory lists, etc.
This particular dealership is multi-franchise, so more than one domain might be used to get there. I might also want the site to be able to rebrand itself depending on the brand name being viewed (load different templates or style sheets). Those are other features that make me think a portal is the way to go.
I'd like to hear opinions on pros and cons of portals vs a completely custom build. I've checked out Joomla!, Drupal, PostNuke, PHPNuke, and DotNetNuke, and I like DNN the best so far. The "pure" CMS systems seemed to be more oriented towards managing articles and submitted content, which makes sense, but I don't need that.
There are existing companies in the dealership website building business that I intend to look into. My gut feeling is that they'll have the backend functionality I would need, but not the crisp, creative front end. If that's the case, I'll still be left to decide whether to use a portal to handle layout and page management, or a custom site. Maybe it's legitimate to use both: the portal for site management, but embed custom elements into the portal objects...
Thanks for your advice,
Chris
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