Adobe Success Story

Project Details

ISITE Design creates effective web experiences that build on a client's brand through the unique capabilities of web technology. In many cases, this involves long-term partnerships with clients, including site maintenance contracts. However, when it comes to content management, ISITE Design has always believed that the power of content management should rest with the owners of that content, not with programmers and web designers. To that end, the company builds content management solutions, including custom administration tools, for its clients that have large, dynamic sites, or web applications. It also fulfills ongoing maintenance contracts for smaller clients with simple, static, "brochure" sites.

"We have been looking for a single, cost effective way to serve the content management needs of all our clients," says Paul Wille, senior developer, ISITE Design. "Building custom content management solutions to go with the more complex, dynamic sites that we create, means the customer often requires significant training. At the other end of the spectrum, we have taken on maintenance contracts for older, static HTML sites that belong to mom and pop shops that end up consuming a lot of our developers' time for simple content updates."

So when ISITE Design heard about Macromedia Contribute, the company decided to evaluate the product in-house before recommending it to clients. Contribute provides an easy way for users to safely publish web content and edit existing websites. With Contribute, even non-technical users can update content without affecting existing website style, layout, and code. The company reasoned that any content management productivity improvements enjoyed by its highly skilled developers would be doubled by business users at client sites who know nothing about HTML.

Content Management Made Easy

"The simplicity of Contribute really sets it apart," says Hugh Ly, production manager, ISITE Design. "We began using Contribute to replace a laborious process we went through every two weeks updating a cumbersome site. It had evolved out of a combination of hand-coding, HTML, and older versions of Dreamweaver." The client sent a large Excel file containing new updates and instructions, and we would manually search through code to find the files, make the edits, and then upload them to the client.

"With Contribute, we can browse and edit inline, all within the same window," he says. "The WYSIWYG editor takes all the guesswork out of editing static content. What used to take us an hour we can do in 15 minutes."

The New Page Creation feature of Contribute also makes it easy to add new content. "I've never seen a product that makes this so simple," continues Ly. "We are constantly getting requests to add pages. With Contribute, all you have to do is create a new page from an existing page, give it a new file name and make edits, or add content simply by dragging and dropping from Word."

Empowering Clients

Both Ly and Wille see Contribute as a value-add service they can pass along to many ISITE Design clients. "Putting a product into our clients' hands that's simple enough for business users to safely and easily manage their own content empowers them while freeing up their budget dollars for the creative, strategic web design and application work we are known for," says Wille.

ISITE Design feels that up to 60 percent of its clients could benefit from Contribute. "The beauty of the product is that we can recommend it to almost all of our clients," adds Ly. "Most sites have sections like 'FAQs,' or 'Contact Us,' that business users could easily update themselves using Contribute."

With Contribute, ISITE Design can pass along content maintenance responsibilities to its clients with confidence that their edits will match existing website style, code and formatting standards. Contribute allows an administrator to enforce standards across the entire site, and web administrators can easily control who can edit what on a site, using connection keys to get them set up in minutes. Wille estimates that this feature alone will reduce by 80 percent the time it used to take to set up a custom content management solution to remotely administer a client's content. Some of ISITE Designs' larger clients will also benefit from collaboration features like the Check-In/Check-Out system, and file versioning that keeps a history of who made what changes and provides simple rollback to recover previous versions for worry-free editing.

Thinking out of the Box

"Contribute is so easy to use that we are confident our clients will require very little training," says Wille. "It's prompted us to think outside of the box, and has opened up the door to new business we might not have been able to accommodate in the past. A client with a limited budget that wants a straightforward, informational site might not have been able to afford ongoing maintenance fees, or a custom-built content management solution. But today we could build the site and suggest Contribute to manage it. Now we've seen how Contribute integrates into our core competencies, we are excited about passing on the benefits of this product to our clients."

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Summary:
Organization's industry:
Designer/Developer

Macromedia Partner Alliance:
ISITE Design, Inc. is Premier Partner