We are the leading cooling tower manufacturer in the world with over $1 billion in sales and offices in 20 countries. Our parent company, SPX Corporation, is a Fortune 500 company and still produce their website with Dreamweaver - yikes. We built our site exclusively in Expression Engine and launched it in December, 2006. It’s been three months now and we’ve had a chance to shake out all of the quirks.

We abandoned our $50,000 Vignette installation as our CMS after it took too long to develop pages, was too complex, and didn’t allow for flexibility. Thanks for making Expression Engine!

Hi Sean,

quite impressive such a big company based all their work in EE. But what do you mean when you say you built your site “exclusively” in EE? Don’t you use any other application for the HTML websites?

Can one really built their entire side within EE?

thanks
Mario

But what do you mean when you say you built your site “exclusively” in EE?

We thought about using another package for our Library of publications. Instead we realized that we could adapt EE to do those tasks. Of course, now that you mention it, we still haven’t migrated our Sales Representative search application to EE - it’s still asp.net pages running off a database. But I think I have an idea how to do that later this year in EE, too.

And I only brought up the big company stuff because that was one of the points of resistance I had getting I.T. and management to agree to try it—I couldn’t show them many other larger companies that have adopted it. I think Boeing Italy was the only example I could find. Seeing BMI.com here today reminded me that it was important to publicly “come out” as an EE adopter.

Good question, Mario. Thanks.

Very impressive site. I see you guys are into heavy metal.

Did a cooling tower maker actually post an opening for an IA or did they let you choose your own job title? :-)

I believe your use of EE will strengthen the case that many others have to make to their management: that EE can often do the job as well or even better than the high dollar offerings. I will in the future demand SPX whenever I am called upon to specify cooling equipment.

Did a cooling tower maker actually post an opening for an IA or did they let you choose your own job title?

No, they had no idea what an IA was. They had a 40 page site that they wanted expanded to include everything they do and in multiple languages. I told them that they needed a graphic artist, a html/css expert, a web developer, a usability person for testing and taxonomies, and a webmaster. I told them I could do it all, but they’d need to change my title, so they did.

I believe your use of EE will strengthen the case that many others have to make to their management: that EE can often do the job as well or even better than the high dollar offerings.

One of the bigger obstacles I had to getting “buy in” to EE was that it didn’t allow the architecture depth for us to have multiple languages. I proposed to the EE team that if they added another layer [template/blog]—> [project/template/blog] that it would make a big difference to us.

They said that wasn’t likely, so we’re opting to run multiple installs of EE in different directories [domain/language1], [domain/language2], etc… which reminds me that I need to buy another license. I’m working on the Chinese version now.

That is a great site!

It would be great to hear a write up on your experiences with EE and how you went about learning to use the system and any bottlenecks, difficulties and lightbulb moments!

Sean Tevis - 22 March 2007 01:34 PM

We abandoned our $50,000 Vignette installation as our CMS after it took too long to develop pages, was too complex, and didn’t allow for flexibility. Thanks for making Expression Engine!

That’s quite an endorsement!

Luke Stevens - 24 March 2007 10:48 PM

Sean Tevis - 22 March 2007 01:34 PM

We abandoned our $50,000 Vignette installation as our CMS after it took too long to develop pages, was too complex, and didn’t allow for flexibility. Thanks for making Expression Engine!

That’s quite an endorsement!

I believe The Sun newspaper and others use that CMS too. $50,000! I didn’t realise it was that pricey.

My last corporate web job was on a Vignette-driven site.  Our purchase/licensing costs were at least 2X that (IIRC the licensing, at the time anyway, was traffic-driven.  The more popular your site the more you paid).

The biggest frustration I had with Vignette - which has likely changed since then - was that for that hefty licensing fee you didn’t get *any* content management interfaces.

Imagine buying EE and having to not only create your site but also the whole control panel - that’s what we were faced with.

I keep thinking that everything we did using Vignette could be done now with EE - glad to see that’s actually being proven.

I am in the same position as Sean with the university I work for. They all want Drupal sooo bad and I’ve provided every fact on the planet that points out EE as lighter more flexible system. Ugh.

You’re welcome! I see you submitted a Showcase request a while ago. Sounds like I should get you to the top of list. I’d love to feature you on the EE home page and let others read your story. I’ll send an email follow up.

My main corporate web job is also using Vignette across several international sites. I use EE for freelance client work.

ExpressionEngine trumps Vignette in many ways - not just price. Just to add some balance to the thread though, having a Vignette client-side application for development is extremely useful - it’s obviously faster than a web interface, version control is better, and you get code colouring for templates and folder-like FTP integration which is nice.

Still though, if EE were to release a client application it would win hands down.