SOFTWARE TOOLBOX APGEN TESTIMONIAL

Softwaretoolbox.com is a leading provider of software components used in manufacturing automation applications. As a Web based company founded in 1996, we have seen Web technologies and tools evolve immensely.

Early on, we made the decision to go with a database driven site because of the large volume of products that we offer (well over 500 products for a variety of applications). We knew that maintaining static pages by hand would never work, at least not with 1996 vintage tools. Our first generation site (1996) was static, and as a result we had incredible traffic from search engines. When we launched our dynamic ASP site, which enabled our site for e-commerce and gave us the ability to update the site on the fly, we lost our search engine edge. We also had to make significant hardware investments in computing resources to support the user load.

In our latest round of improvements to Softwaretoolbox.com we had several key objectives in mind:

1. Get back to a set of pages that are static and therefore search engine friendly, while still maintaining the ability to update changes quickly from the database - getting that search engine traffic back up is key for us because our customers (engineers) rely on search engines versus magazine advertisements.
2. Increase performance for our users - a faster loading page is important to our customers.
3. Increase capacity and leverage our existing hardware investments.
4. Avoid or at a minimum delay additional costly database server upgrades.
5. Avoid major re-engineering of existing ASP code. We have invested years of ASP programming to build our site.

Fortunately, WebGecko’s APGen product provided everything that we needed to meet our objectives. In addition, APGen allowed us to make the necessary changes in a short period of time. We have found that we could port existing ASP pages over in as little as 5 minutes per ASP page. The example code provided with APGen is a HUGE benefit - we used the site generator code, from the sample provided, to create the builder for our site. This took less than 1 hour. We are seeing performance gains of 300% on ASP pages because we eliminated the dynamic code or 90% of the dynamic code. This is giving us major new capacity headroom on our Web server and database server.

Overall we have found APGen to be easy to use and understand. We highly recommend this tool to any ASP programmer looking to beef up their site performance and capacity with minimal effort.

John Weber
President
Software Toolbox