Its getting late here, so thankfully you won't have to put up with reading a giant diatribe on our new site.  However, you may find both how we use our site and what we did to launch it useful...

First - its using the ECF as a base platform/architecture so we really didn't have to do much at all except design the master template theme.

We also were on the previous ECF 2004.2 version of the product so our migration was also fairly simple in that we did some minor conversion of customers, orders, software (digital downloads), and of course profiles/accounts.

The entire "facelift" and new updates to our site actually took about a week, but that time was split into 2 efforts.

Effort 1 - Creating a new master template theme (That was easy) although we played with a bunch of different designs and settled on this simple left nav approach to give us the flexibility we need for future content and sections.  If you are new to .NET or are using classic approaches to hadnling site design or form/function seperation, you should really check out the Master Pages Approach in general at Microsoft.com or see how the ECF uses this as a fundamental architectural approach because it is really powerful and sets you up (like us) to make dramatic changes in short timeframes.

http://www.mediachase.com/Product/CategoryInfo.aspx?cid=341  in upper right corner are some links to Microsoft info areas...

Effort 2 - Integrating the new community server with the ECF - this took us a few days and was most of the work.  I must say that we like the community server and the integration with the ECF security and account architecture was a small challenge.  We had to make sure that we connected our security model with the different security model of CS.  For us, it was important that we connect our communities directly into our content and commerce capabilities so we were running on the same common platform.  It gives us some new capababilities we hope will be helpful to everyone.  In the end you can see pretty much how the 2 platforms are now integrated together.

What's Next?

In the short term, you will see some expanded content and information appear over the next 2 weeks on this site, and of course everyone here is determining their BLOG approach. 

As you can see from this, I have some work to do...