The best magazine
Yes - of course.
The company I work for provide Content Management Systems (CMS) for the vast majority of sites we build for our clients and that's almost a given in this age where publishing on-line is ubiquitous and free for all.
In many cases our client wants to be able to add their own changes to page content and as they add more services and change the way they provide existing ones they have a need to update and evolve their site and what they say about their business over time.
This affords them freedom and control at the same time and for the most part our clients are delighted.
But what are the down sides? Are there any? On balance I would have to say they are a good thing, but of course that depends on the application in question.
Let me present a couple of scenarios to elucidate my point: 1.
The high design corporate web site The high design corporate web site is a beautifully crafted design.
Images are magazine quality, the code and CSS are W3C validated and all design elements are placed pixel perfect on the page.
The designer has spent a great deal of time cross-browser testing and working with the design to get it just right for different display media/devices.
From the time the site goes live the sentiment is positive and praise heaped upon the design team.
Everyone from the boardroom down is delighted with the gleaming newly created corporate image.
So far so good.
But the company want to edit their site to display news items and special offers and decide that the corporate message should be worded differently.
The VP of Communications decides that it might be a good idea to slap an image of the team on the about us page too and maybe post a YouTube video of the last corporate team raft-building day.
The only problem here is that he uploads it along with some pre-formatted text from a word-processed document.
The table structure of this perfectly crafted site creaks and groans under the strain of the unformatted content and ultimately buckles out of position, pushing images and text left and right to form a design layout that fails to impress from whatever angle you choose to tilt your head.
Yup.
It's gone from an elegant and tasteful piece of design and web craftsmanship to an eye-sore in one click of the CMS Add button.
What a disaster! But a good web site should be designed with CMS edit functions which don't intrude upon design or which prevent this kind of disruption to layout and visual aesthetics some may say.
Well...
I can say for sure that after over 10 years of web development and coding I have yet to see a good working example of this in practice.
Time and time again, we painstakingly craft elegantly designed sites for clients who after a few months uploading their content seem to unwittingly reduce their sites to visual rubble.
I look forward to the day when we can develop a CMS which says "Hey mate - Wait a minute - That 18MB 3400 x 2800 pixel image won't fit on your special offers page and would take 4 minutes to view to anyone on a connection of less than 100MBps", or "Woooow dude, I know we gave you a TINY MCE editor with your CMS because you like to type WYSIWYG style, but does that Comic Sans font in Bold really go with the Verdana, Georgia we applied to the rest of your site.
Worse than that does it not clash a little in style with the bit of blog your colleague added in Helvetica last week just below.
My point here is that if a site is particularly design conscious or in any way perfectionist in terms of its visual style or layout, you should give due consideration to the use of a CMS, and if you are going to offer your clients direct editing control on their site, that it is implemented carefully.
Here are some approaches you can take to ensure your clients newly designed site does not crumble before your very eyes (and the eyes of their customers) a few weeks after going live: a.
Discuss and agree which parts of the site should be client editable and stick to it.
b.
Offer training in how to add content and get the formatting right so it does not interfere with existing sites styles.
c.
Program some CMS controls to check file sizes, and other file parameters to mitigate risk of inappropriate uploads.
2.
The heavily on-page optimised site So you have a newly designed site just going live for a hotel in a city where competition is strong, and you have spent time with the in-house SEO making sure everything has been done to keyword optimise your clients new site.
The same problem and worse occurs here..
..
You have tread the fine line between design and on-page keyword optimisation, carefully integrating header tags to output page titles in a tasteful and unobtrusive manner to blend with design, and added just the right number of keyphrases to get your keyword density right in order to achieve good page position in the SERPS for your clients target keyphrase.
And..
..
Thanks to our wonderful CMS along comes Mr Jones from Marketing to plonk a 500 word blog item about the opening of the new wedding function suite right in the middle of the homepage text.
Ah, the wonders of the CMS.
That said, for the vast majority of other styles of sites, from Blogs to less commercial sites where design or SEO are less of a concern, a good CMS is essential part of the mix and well...
Truth be told we couldn't do without it.
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