The maintenance of their website is a non issue for our customers, because we take care of everything. The only exception is the need to change the content of the website, which can easily occur many times during its lifetime.
For reasons of both cost and flexibility, most website owners prefer to manage the content of their websites themselves, but with the option of calling on us when the need arises.
Content management means different things to different people. For some, it involves the use of an FTP tool to upload the information to the website. For others, it can mean manually changing the contents of files or databases on the web server. In other situations, it requires the skills of the original web developer, which is especially true for Flash based websites. There is also a wide variation in the extent to which the website content can be changed.
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Each of our customers is provided with direct online WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing facilities, so that they can manage the entire content of their website themselves.
This is not a feature that can be simply tacked on to an existing website. It is an integral feature of each and every page, so each website is designed specifically to accommodate this easy to use form of content management.
We refer to the person responsible for maintaining the content of the website as its administrator. Apart from the website administrator needing to log in, in order to assure the security of the website, he or she is able to view every page exactly the same way the normal visitor views them.
The only difference is the inclusion of one or more discrete “edit”, “delete” or “add” buttons, as required for each page. When the administrator clicks on an edit button, exactly the same page is displayed, but in an editing mode. These WYSIWYG editors require no more than basic word processing skills on the part of the administrator.
Once the administrator has made the required changes, he or she clicks on a save button, which causes the page to be redisplayed in its normal non-editable form. This edited version of the page is also immediately available to any other website visitor.
Either a general purpose editor is used or one that is specifically designed for the particular page, according to the page content. The special purpose editors are used for those pages that contain several distinct fields of information rather than more straightforward text and images.
This type of content management facility has been an integral aspect of all of our websites for many years. It is the most efficient way of maintaining the content of a website regardless of whether the task is undertaken by the customer or by us.
We do not expect the website administrator to be either a web designer or a web developer. The editing facilities ensure that any changes made by the administrator comply with the style of the text and the layout of the pages while preserving the overall colour scheme and look of the website.
Whilst the administrator can change the text fonts and their colours, these are restricted to those that do not conflict with the particular style chosen by customer, such as the use of garish colours or fonts.
The following constrains are normally imposed on the editors: -
- A range of font sizes, to a maximum of six
- A range of colours, to a maximum of four
- The colours that can be used for external and internal links
- The indent depth, the style of a numbered list style and the bullet style
- The style of any links
Within these constraints, various adjustments are permitted, such as: -
- Set bold, Set Italic, Select font size, Select text colour
- Indent, Add number lists, Add bullet points
- Insert internal website links
- Insert links to other websites
Experience has shown that these options cater for the requirements of the vast majority of pages within any website.
Certain technologies are avoided in order to provide this type of content management. A prime example is Flash movies, for which the content has either to be hard coded into the movie or downloaded from the server.
Most of the content being managed is text, which can be either typed directly into the editor or copied from a Word or other document. Photographic and other images, audio clips, video clips, PDF documents and other files can be uploaded via the editor for inclusion in the website.
When the general purpose editor is used, the images can be positioned anywhere within the editable area of the page. In other cases, the position of the images may be at a fixed position on the page, such as in a slide show, in which case, the administrator merely changes the images to be included and their display sequence.
Facilities are also included for automatically adjusting the size of each image, or cropping it, to suit its particular location on the page. This avoids the need for the administrator to make these adjustments offline before uploading the images.
The entire content of the each website is held as tables, normally in a SQL Database, so none of it is “hard coded”. When the content is edited online by the administrator, these tables are updated “behind the scenes”. The entire content of the website can be maintained in this way.