A training catalogue people need to compare
DCATT, DC Advanced Technology Training, is a Halifax-based provider of hands-on IT training across cybersecurity, networking, development, databases and cloud. Its visitors are IT professionals and the managers who pay for their courses, and they arrive with a specific question: which course covers what I need, how long does it take, and how is it delivered.
The site describes more than 100 courses. The course records we worked from span more than 30 subject areas, from security and Cisco to Azure, SQL Server and PowerShell. The largest groups are security, Microsoft Office and data analysis, and each course runs anywhere from one to five days. A list that long is useless as a scroll. It needs to behave like a catalogue.
Delivery matters as much as content. Some learners need a classroom and an instructor, some need to study online on their own schedule, and a manager booking for a team needs to know which is which before picking up the phone. The catalogue treats delivery as a filter in its own right rather than a line buried in each description.
From static pages to a proper application
The starting point was four static pages: a landing page, a training catalogue, a course details page and a videos page. We converted them into an ASP.NET MVC application, which is what dcatt.ca runs on today. The header and footer moved into one shared layout, so a change to the navigation is made once and appears on every page, instead of being copied by hand into each file.
The catalogue is the core of the work. Visitors can search by course name, code or keyword, then narrow the list by category, by length from one to five days, and by delivery: online, in person or on demand. Results can be sorted by name, code, category or duration and shown as a grid or a list, with a live count that updates as filters change. Course information is laid out the same way on every card, so two courses can be read side by side.
Courses are modelled as proper records, each with a code, name, category, duration and delivery methods, with the controller structure set up for a database. Once courses are records, adding one means adding a row, and each course can have its own details page built from the same template, reached by its course code. That is the line between a website and a small web application, and it is the kind of work our portals and web apps page describes.
What changed
The headline is weight. On 16 September 2026, Lighthouse measured the DCATT home page at 116 KiB across 13 requests, the lightest site in our portfolio by a distance. On desktop it scored 99 for performance and 100 for SEO, and the largest element painted in 0.8 seconds. It is also the one site in the portfolio that clears 85 on the simulated phone run, at 89 for performance on the same day.
Light pages matter here for a plain reason. People comparing training courses often do it at work, on a locked-down machine or a slow guest network, and a catalogue that loads instantly gets used. For whoever maintains the site, the shared layout means a navigation change is a one-file edit instead of four separate ones that can drift apart.
What we do not have yet is the business side: enquiries per month, or which catalogue searches people run. When the client is ready to share those, they will go here with their dates.
What we would do differently
- Accessibility on phones. Lighthouse scored accessibility 92 on desktop and 84 on the phone run, on 16 September 2026. That gap is the first thing to close, and it is the kind of fix that takes an afternoon.
- Start with the data. The conversion began with the course list shipped alongside the page and a model ready for a database. Starting from the client's course records would have meant doing the data work once.
- Count from day one. Catalogue searches and enquiries should be logged from launch, so the site can show what people look for and which courses they ask about.
See it live
The site is at dcatt.ca, with the catalogue under Training. If your business has a catalogue, a booking flow or a members' area that has outgrown a brochure site, that is a portal or web app conversation, and the Halifax web design page covers how we work with businesses here.
Sources: Lighthouse runs dated 2026-09-16; build details from the project's conversion notes and course records.