Your Online Presence > Managing Content

Managing your website content on a tight budget

By Danny Sofer, Kitsite.com

For many organisations the web has become a critical channel of communication, but a badly-managed website can take up unsustainable amounts of valuable staff time whilst becoming increasingly hard for users to navigate. This short article attempts to highlight what you should be looking for to manage your website content and to summarise some of the options available to you.

Simple content management

Most pages on a website do not exist in isolation, but have a context. This context is likely to be provided by some sort of navigation and a look and feel that is shared with other pages. At a minimum, pages might share a common header and footer. Additionally, pages within a section might share an additional level of navigation that links them together. It is the maintenance of this navigational structure, which for growing websites is usually the biggest problem that has to be faced and with which existing tools are likely to offer the least help. Bearing this in mind, the seven key elements required of a simple content management system for a website are:

1. To create and edit pages;
2. To create new sections on a site;
3. To add images (and other media) to pages;
4. To create links within a page;
5. To create and update navigation;
6. To maintain the overall design of the site;
7. To prevent broken links.

Solutions

Design

Perhaps the most important design consideration for a website that you are going to manage yourself is maintainability. It’s not very useful having a website that conveys your organisations’s values and looks beautiful if it’s a pig to maintain.

Two crucial questions to ask of a website design are whether there is a standard page template that can easily be used for new pages, and how are new pages and sections going to be incorporated into the site.

Page editors

Web page editors, such as Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion, do have some features that support the needs of simple content management. These include the use of templates, components (reusable page fragments), and server-side includes (of which more in a moment).

An advantage of these editors is that you are likely to already be familiar with one of them; one disadvantage is that learning to use their advanced features effectively will take time and patience, and quite possibly some training.

Server-Side Includes, not frames

Server-side includes, or SSIs, are a mechanism for allowing fragments of text or HTML to be included in a page when it is requested from the web. SSI’s are supported by most web servers and allow common elements, such as navigation, to be maintained separately from page contents.

SSIs are a powerful tool that allow some very large sites to maintain the consistency of their content without recourse to expensive content management software, on the other hand their use is likely to require training and support (at least initially) and will require that they be supported by the company hosting your web server.

For more information see the Web Reference articles and tutorials on SSIs.

Please don’t be tempted to use frames, which similarly allow content and navigation to be maintained independently but which prevent pages being effectively linked to or bookmarked or printed and, most damagingly, will ensure that a site fails most accessibility guidelines and is unavailable to a significant proportion of web users.

For more on why not to use frames see Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 1996: Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time).

Other options

Described as desktop content management by its creators, CityDesk is a content management tool for websites that is aimed at PC users with small budgets. It has been well received by reviewers, but it does require proficiency in HTML and will require time to get familiar with.

Macromedia have also launched Contribute which is designed to allow non-technical users to update and publish web content.

Blogger is a web-based service for maintaining lists of links (weblogs or ‘blogs’). Used in conjunction with SSI’s, it is a powerful tool for updating links anywhere on a site.

Finally, make sure that your web hosting company provides you with log reports so that you can check for broken links.

Conclusion

There are no easy solutions for people on tight budgets. All require a commitment to getting your hands dirty with complex software applications (or being reliant on somebody else to do it for you). In the future, expect page editors, to start delivering more content management features, and expect more desktop content management products like CityDesk and Contribute to appear.

Perhaps more interestingly, look out for affordable through-the-web content management tools to be offered as a value-added service from internet service providers.

For more information see the knowledgebase article "Web Content Management Systems".

Whatever solution you choose, it is important to take make sure that web pages generated will be accessible to disabled people.

For more information on this issue, please see the Accessibility and Inclusion section of the knowledgebase.