Even though we did not consciously schedule our Q3 release to occur during the US presidential election week, we now see the similarities between the election and our release. Just as the election is of historical significance to the US people, so too is our Q3 release for us. We managed to push our biggest release in time filled with major improvements and new additions and refinements across all existing product lines, an official release of our Silverlight controls, 3 major new controls for WPF (gauge,chart and scheduler) and, last but not least, the first release of our newly acquiredOpenAccess ORM product.
But that is not all - we unveiled something that had been in the works for several months - the all new telerik.com website.
I think everyone on the team had not been as excited as we are today for a very long time. Today marks an end to months of hard work to transition our old website to one entirely based Sitefinity. The project required a lot of time and dedication for most people in the company create and sort through the myriad wireframes, designs, re-designs, website synching, images, content re-writes and, as you can imagine, lots of extra code lines we put in order to fully tie in and migrate all of our resources. Despite the long road and the numerous challenges we had to face along , it has been a great experience to extensively use ourUI components and Sitefinity for the new website. We believe that eating our own dogfood is essential in validating the quality, viability and trustworthiness of any of our products product and I have to to make all products better along the way.
Another great thing about the whole project was that we were able to validate Sitefinity as a very flexible development platform. . It truly showed how old code,written properly of course, can be re-used seamlessly within Sitefinity. And I have to say it - working with in Sitefinity as an end-user is a pretty fun experience.
We also plan to make a series of blog posts about the whole project and publish some of the wireframes, earlier designs, and discuss some implementation details such as the advanced caching techniques we are using for the site (and which will soon ship with Sitefinity).
Our goal was a more elegantly designed Telerik.com that adheres to trusted UX standards and offers better & structured content. We hope that apart from the visual appeal and user experience you will also appreaciateappreciate one particular major improvement of the new website - its speed. We spentd a decent amount of work to ensure that the new site performs significantly faster than before. There are some areas that are still a bit heavy, but those will overhauled very soon. And make sure you play and use the new search - expect it to produce better results faster.
Just as with every release, there were some small glitches and we continue to work around the clock to address them. We hope you like it. As usual, you are all invited to comment. Things could be a bit shaky in the next few days but we will fix it and we are counting on your patience and feedback to make things better.
And enjoy the Q3 release!