When we hand over a website to our clients we say that “its easy to publish content”. But we also say “All you need to know is headings, subheadings and paragraphs. Just add the odd image”.
Because with good typography that's all that is needed for creating good looking content, and you should be concentrating in the value of the words, not the eye candy.
But some of our clients are always looking to do more. They want to use the authoring tool as if it is a desktop publishing tool. I guess that's fair enough, and we do use the tool for that very purpose, albeit with a lot more knowledge.
The problem for our clients has been that the editor looks superficially like MS Word, but using it with those expectations often results in unexpected results – and frustration! Remember that the editor is creating HTML, not Word doc. Its not so simple, and we were starting to hear some cries for help!
The editor we routinely include in our CMS administration screens is called FCKeditor. There has been a recent update to its functionality that we are currently testing. It seems to contain a number of key improvements that improve its usability, particularly for new users.
The most important changes are:
We will be rolling it out for all new customers. If you are an existing customer and interested in getting your CMS updated then give us a call.
Way back in the day, when the web was new, hyperlinks were pretty new fangled items. Many people had never seen them before, and thus didn't really know what to do with them. The web designers of the time came up with a solution to get around this. It was called Click here.
However times have moved on now. The web is literally an everyday tool for everyday people. The 'click here' is now implicit. So why do so many people continue to use it in their hyperlinks and their calls to action.
There are better ways to do things.
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a business owner who was afraid of the intellectual property (IP) invested in his website being stolen by competitors. It was eerily similar to another conversation we had had previously with a client when negotiating what content to put in their website.
On face value their concerns about protecting their intellectual property were a valid one, but it raises an interesting dilemma. How do you promote the value of your business to your customers without revealing the value of your business to your competitors.
I thought it was worth a deeper examination.
Ok, I may be a bit weird – as a client side programmer by trade a disturbingly large amount of my life is taken up with web browsers, - but I was surprised to discover that some people don't realise that there are several different kinds of web browsers out there, and how each one affects the web browsing experience.
Lets take a quick review of the field.
I've just been on a bit of a blogging bender. I almost forgot the important news.
We have our online support videos up and running!
These are a series of videos demonstrating the use of the CMS that we build all our websites with. We have around 16 up already and we will be adding more soon.
Please check them out and let us know what you think. If you think they are missing anything then please let us know and we will update and amend them.
Over time we will be adding more, dealing with topics of website strategy, email campaign management and more.
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