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Managing a large
website is difficult, especially when individuals provide content
from across numerous departments. To guarantee organizational
standards, a typical web department must manage the content each
author contributes.
Managing such a development process typically consists of:
- Ensuring the content complies with design guidelines (that
it fits the standard look and feel).
- Training users in the tools for developing content (web development
tools such as Dreamweaver MX).
- Controlling assets that users access on the site (ensuring
users access to only the files and folders they are responsible
for).
- Verifying that content complies with guidelines before it
goes live (for example, that the code complies with W3C standards).
Faced with these duties, some web departments choose a content
management system (CMS) so they can control content and manage
workflow and users. Unfortunately, most CMS packages are extremely
expensive, difficult to install and customize, and require an
enormous amount of end-user training. For these three reasons
a large-scale CMS system might not be the best investment.
If your organization is like ours, and you're looking to conform
to current W3C standards, the typical CMS fails this test. Most
major CMS systems stumble when it comes to writing standards-compliant
code. That said, you can still use your favorite HTML editor (such
as Dreamweaver MX), but this adds cost and training time to the
project.
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Researching a solution for managing
content
I work in a web department at a major university medical center,
and our group encountered the problems I describe above. In our
group, less than a half-dozen developers supports multiple websites
totaling over 20,000 pages of content. Needless to say, the web
group does not author the content for each of the pages. Each department
assigns individuals who are responsible for their site content.
Since, content contributors do not spend a lot of time working
on the site, keeping them trained on using Dreamweaver MX can
be difficult. Often, an individual produces a page that fails
to comply with our web guidelines (they stray from our templates).
For example, an author may use deprecated tags, such as the <font>
tag to apply text styles; this introduces problematic markup and
deviates from design guidelines.
We've struggled trying to find a solution for some time. We needed
a tool that was:
- Easy-to-use.
- Did not require too much training
- Gave authors some flexibility to control the look of their
content while locking down portions of the page that shouldn't
be changed.
- Could manage groups of authors
- Could generate standards-compliant code.
We desperately needed a solution. We were planning a major redesign
of one of our sites, which contained approximately 15,000 pages.
As they say, timing is everything. While we were looking for a
solution, Macromedia called and asked if we would test a new product
called Macromedia Contribute. |
Solving the problem with Contribute
How can Contribute solve some, if not all, of these problems? Contribute
uses the same code engine as Dreamweaver MX; it writes code that
complies with the standards. If you specify an XHTML DTD in your
document, Contribute will generate XHTML code. Web departments can
also manage users through Contribute: specifying which folders users
can access, which templates the user can use to create new pages,
what formatting tools are available, and so on. We have
approximately 60 templates, each relating to departments within
the medical center. Through Contribute, we can create user groups
for each of the 60 departments; we can specify which templates
each group can use, while hiding the rest of the templates. This
reduces confusion for your users and prevents authors from creating
pages with the wrong template. This is especially useful in our
group: since each of our templates contains Coldfusion code written
especially for the department, choosing the wrong template can
cause serious problems.
Perhaps the most difficult problem our group faces is training
and supporting content contributors. We currently offer two courses
in Dreamweaver MX every month and we answer numerous web-related
questions by e-mail and phone every day, stealing valuable time
we could use to design new web properties and develop web applications.
While Dreamweaver MX is the best tool available, it's a professional
IDE that overwhelms the occasional user. In addition, while the
help files can answer to most users' they rarely consult them.
Contribute reduces the content contribution process to the essential:
adding and editing text, images, tables, links, and so on. Content
contributors do not need to create forms or write Coldfusion code;
therefore, these options are not available in Contribute. This
is not to say that Contribute is a stripped-down version of Dreamweaver
MX—it's not. Instead it's a completely new application designed
from the ground up with content contributors in mind.
Contribute boils the content development process to three simple
steps: browse, edit, and publish. The interface is simple to use—if
your contributors know how to use Internet Explorer or Netscape
Navigator, they can browse web pages, and therefore, they'll be
able to use Contribute easily.
In Contribute, once they browse to the page they want to edit,
they can begin editing by simply clicking the Edit button. While
they edit, they can add images, tables, and so forth easily (see
Figure 1).
What's more, they can add Microsoft Word and Excel content through
a single menu option. We've found that many departments have Word
documents that they would like to move to the web, but don't know
how to do it. Contribute makes the process easy. Once a contributor
finishes editing an existing page or creating a new page, they
publish it by clicking the Publish button.
Since Contribute has the check-in and check-out feature, authors
won't have to worry about overwriting each other's work. Many
of our contributors have a difficult time managing files—they'll
accidentally move folders or delete files and have a generally
difficult time understanding the check-in/check-out process.
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Figure 1: The Contribute
browser. |
Reducing training time with Contribute
Okay, so Contribute is easy to use. How easy? It took 30 minutes
to train a user who had never, ever worked on the web. That's right,
this user had never used Dreamweaver MX or FrontPage, or saved a
Word document as HTML. She now works 20 hours a week editing and
creating pages in Contribute. What's more, with the Contribute
administration tools, specifying the pages she works on and getting
her connected was just as easy. Through Contribute, we created
a connection key (a file) and e-mailed it to her. She simply double-clicked
on the file and followed the steps in the Contribute connection
wizard to set herself up.
You won't need to send any more multi-page Word documents explaining
how to connect Dreamweaver MX to servers. Additionally, you can
use the Contribute Administrator to control user access to files
and folders, turn off menu options, and enforce accessibility
options. Now you realize just how much time Contribute has saved
our web group and content authors. The time required training
authors changes from hours to minutes.
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Enforcing standards with Contribute
Of course, every organization has web standards. Typically, they're
published somewhere on a corporate intranet and nobody reads them.
Since nobody reads them, nobody follows them, and by extension,
content authors create pages that don't comply with the standard
look and feel of your web site. Even if you use Dreamweaver MX templates,
users can still modify font face, color, and so forth. The Contribute
administrator can enforce your company's style sheet on your users.
You won't have to clean up anymore <font> tags! In addition,
the styles are listed in a pop-up menu, similar to the styles
pop-up menu in Microsoft Word, so users should be familiar with
applying them (see Figure 2). That said, you might be wondering
how you can prevent users from applying the wrong style to page
elements (such as applying a heading style to an entire paragraph).
Read on, and I'll tell you how.
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Figure 2: The Contribute styles.
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| As you can see, using Contribute can save both
web departments and content authors time. Now comes perhaps the
most important point. Using Contribute can also help web departments
deliver important information to web authors quickly.
Since Contribute is extensible, web departments can create help
documents for authors as they write content. For example, if you
have a style sheet for your page, you'll probably want to create
a CSS dictionary that defines how to use the styles and what they
look like. Or, perhaps you have a web standards document that
defines how web authors can use your company's logo. Instead of
burying these documents somewhere on your intranet where nobody
will read them, you can add the information to the How Do I panel
(see Figure 3) on the left side of the Contribute interface. If
users ask about a certain style, they can immediately access information
in the How Do I panel within Contribute. We've found that users
are far more likely to look up the answer to a question if they
have easy access to the answers.
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Figure 3: The How Do I panel
in Contribute.
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As if this wasn't enough, you can use the Contribute
browser to point users to site locations for additional help.
Further, you can create a dynamic FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
area, contact and request pages for users to search FAQ lists
in a database (and administered by the web group), send email
to the web group, or submit requests to the web group.
Again, since Contribute is browser-based, your users can accomplish
all of this without opening another application. Contribute becomes
the single point of contact between the web group and its content
authors. When our users start Contribute, it displays important
information within the splash page (see Figure 4). You can do
the same. |
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Figure 4: As you can see, you
can modify the introduction page for your contributors.
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About the author
Mike Hazard is a Web designer and developer for the University
of Rochester Medical Center where he develops websites and online
learning applications. Mike has written numerous training books
on technologies such as Coldfusion and XML.
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