Red Guerrilla
Our Company
RED Guerrilla was conceived from the idea that things could and should be different. The marketplace is missing that personal touch and top quality service that people deserve.
We treat our clients as individuals, not part of the herd, and they truly form part of our business; without them we can't go on producing the work we do.
Our team combine years of experience with a fiery passion in providing feature-rich, user-friendly digital solutions and cutting edge designs. We create outstanding websites, bespoke online applications, create/redesign brand identities, enable clients to get the best from social media and much more beyond.
With web development experience dealing with prestigious, national companies and public corporations including the NHS and a design background with clients including GQ magazine, we believe we can provide you with whatever you're looking for in a web presence, be it a new website, redesign, SEO assistance, or an e-marketing campaign.
Silverback CMS Project
We wanted to provide a powerful and flexible solution to our clients when it comes to managing the content of their websites. Although there are plenty of content management systems available to keep a website up to date, none of them had everything we wanted to offer our clients in one package and they couldn’t offer the flexibility of totally bespoke functionality that we wanted to be in a position to provide.
With Silverback CMS, we have built a unique, scalable and modular system that offers a great content management experience out of the box, but can be tweaked and tailored to a client’s needs very effectively to suit their particular situation.
We Started with a Suite from DevExpress Competitors
In much the same way as a top chef will choose an appropriate skillet to prepare their dish of choice, rather than hand craft one from scratch, we made the decision to use one of the many ASP.NET Control Suites to enhance development of our CMS and provide the best user experience possible.
Before we were introduced to DevExpress, we started development with a suite from one of their competitors. Whilst the controls we choose offered a comparable end user experience, from a development point of view we found ourselves repeatedly hitting our heads off a digital brick wall, encountering issue after issue and being forced to produce unnecessarily large scripts to produce very simple functionality. The software’s developers were impossible to get hold of for support and the documentation was limited to set-in-stone examples - in short, it quickly became clear that this was a long and painful development path we were about to embark upon.
A No-Brainer Choice
After turning to Google’s ubiquity, we came across DevExpress and their impressive range of development suites and applications. Once we had demoed some of the trial controls we were hooked and made the difficult decision to redevelop our current work to integrate with DevExpress’ ASP.NET Control Suite.
The online demos, downloadable fully-functioning trial versions and online support available made it a no-brainer to choose DevExpress for our development needs.
Page Management Module
The biggest difficulty we faced was with the page management aspect of the CMS. We have two separate content panes, one with a TreeView of pages and one with the page properties and page content of the selected page.
Managing the adding, updating and deleting of nodes in the TreeView and the consequent updating of both left and right hand content panes using callback panels is a hugely complex one. Fortunately, the DevExpress DXperience ASP.NET controls make the task a lot more straightforward to both code and manage.
We found the Callback panels, Splitter controls, and TreeView controls were the best suited for our application and used them more than any other. The TreeView especially is fantastic with its virtual node methods and asynchronous updating.
DevExpress Tools Are Willing to Work with You
DevExpress tools are just great. However you want to use them, they are more than willing to work with you, not against you. You can drag and drop them onto the canvas in Visual Studio and configure them using smart tabs, just as you would with a native asp.net control; conversely you can also just code them up, right in the HTML with almost endless configuration options.
Smooth is Fast
We no longer have to struggle every step of the way with third party controls; we just drop the DevExpress controls onto the page and away we go. There is a saying, ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’ and the DevExpress ASP.NET Controls are as smooth as they come, hence we get things done faster.
Since we spend less time and energy getting results, we can focus on providing our clients with the service they deserve and looking into new and exciting features.
Why We Like DXperience from DevExpress
I have yet to come across any issues or downsides to choosing the DevExpress ASP.NET Controls. They are simple to use and implement, integrate seamlessly and effortlessly with our code, offer a lightning fast, lightweight end-user experience and offer a ridiculously rich server-side and client-side API, which is again simple and straightforward to implement.
As if the above wasn’t enough, the DevExpress team have a huge wealth of support available from simple, friendly advice from a real person, to a beyond-extensive catalog of documentation, covering everything from API structure to online demos and instructional videos to get you started. I know we certainly made use of this valuable resource on more than one occasion while we were starting out and as a reference manual for some trickier things we worked on.
Our users enjoy both the quality of our content management system and the speedy turnaround of any development requests and change requests that are achieved.
What would you say if you were recommending DevExpress Controls to a friend?
I would say, without equivocation that anyone interested in speeding up development time and providing a better end user experience should invest in the DevExpress DXperience ASP.NET control suite.
If you like software that makes sense straightaway, is a pleasure to use and just plain works, then you should stop your search here and head on over to the purchase page now – you won't regret it.
In fact we would be more than happy to discuss our use and opinion of the DevExpress tools to anyone who’s in the decision making process, simply get in touch with us through our contact details here, or on our website.
Rob Kendal
