Website Content Management and Video Recorders
Sheffield Web Designer's Idle Moments
- Blog: July 2009
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I was struck the other day when my partner, Jeanette, asked me to program the video recorder
before we went out for the evening, why some people find such things so difficult.
I guess it's a mental block that afflicts a good number of people since that's why Video Plus
was introduced.
Why Video Plus?
Video Plus got round the 'video recorders are complicated' mental block by turning a bunch of times, dates and channels into a single number. You look up the number in the TV mag or newspaper and bang it into your video. The Video Plus designers were smart - they gave the most common program times the shortest codes. (Was 'Corrie' just a single digit?) Designers of content management systems would do well to take note as some are so complex you might as well learn to write the underlying HTML code in the first place!
What is Content Management?
A Content Management System, CMS to its friends, is basically a software package that allows you to make changes to your website without any knowledge of HTML or any of the other web technologies. Sounds great at first - until you stop to think about it a little. What it means is that you, the site owner, are now responsible for what your website looks like and how it performs - and that is after you've learned how to use the CMS! One of my clients has a CMS based website created by another web designer some time ago and, even tho he is very computer literate, he still comes to me for site changes.
A full blown content management system like Joomla or Mambo is wonderful if you have lots of authors writing different parts of your website - a news or magazine site for example. But it's complete overkill for what most small businesses want to do. In my experience most want to make changes to particular parts of the site quite frequently but leave other parts unchanged. A hairdresser might want to update treatments and prices or staff pages quite frequently as techniques and fashions change and stylists come and go, but he won't want to change the carefully search engine optimised pages that bring the visitors in.
Targetted Content Management: CMS made easy!
Enter TCM, Targetted Content Management. This technology lets your web designer (me, hopefully!) specify parts of the site that are changeable while leaving the rest 'fixed'. Maybe you want a 'Latest News' column or a portfolio page that you can update regularly. Because the system only has to manage a small part of the site, updating is as easy as filling in a form on a web page (password protected naturally). You want to add another news story? Simple - just fill in the headline and a couple of paragraphs of text and and hit the 'Publish' button.
It comes down to money in the end!
Naturally the more of the site you want to control in this way the more complex the CMS system becomes but, like Video Plus, the simple, frequently used parts are quick and easy. And if they're quick and easy for the web designer they'll be cheaper too!
* Give us a call on 08450 533466 and see what we can do for your website.