So you want to manage your own website?
Content managed sites have become quite popular and for good reason… it means being able to make updates to your website without having to contact your web designer and being charged additional fees. With that said, let me review with you what you will need to be able to manage your site without becoming overwhelmed and frustrated.
FIRST: GET ORGANIZED
No web designer can product content-rich, beautiful sites without first getting organized. The designer has worked on producing a well-organized structure for your site, but you need to be organized in order to utilize the website tools. You need to put all of your log-in information in one place where you can access it easily. It can be in a notebook, file or on your computer, but you need to be able to refer to it easily. In this file you will need to note all of the log-in and password information for:
- Your Domain Name (take note of where it was registered so you can go there and manage it)
- FTP - File Transfer Protocol used to upload files to your server (you should have this information even if you don’t need it to manage your site.
- Control Panel(s) - you may have more than one control panel: site administration, store administration, site statistics, are just a few that might be accessed from different control panels.
In addition to having quick access to all of your log-in information, you should also have a central area for your notes. Often a content management editor will have online “help” files - use these before calling your designer and asking how to do something. If there are no online help files but you took notes when the designer trained you on the interface - keep them handy. You will most likely need to refer to them often.
OVER-RIDING DESIGN FEATURES
This is a real sticking point with web designers. Most likely your site was designed utilizing a Cascading Style Sheet (.css file). The Cascading Style Sheet dictates the font type, color, size, etc. however, the style sheet can be over-ruled by the use of FONT tags. Since most people who are managing their websites are not professional designers, the end result of the use of FONT tags is not pretty. In addition, it is not easy to “update” the look of a site if FONT tags have been used. Normally, a change to the Cascading Style Sheet will automatically update all of the font information on a site - but not those that have used FONT tags. Those will need to be updated manually. Speak to your designer about the style sheet and request style changes if necessary before you start managing the site so that you will have available to you specific styles that you want.
REVIEW INSTRUCTIONS WITH YOUR DESIGNER
As part of the design package, your designer should be able to review with you the basics on how to make changes to your site. Take notes and, as noted above, keep those notes in a safe place where you can access them frequently. Understand that you have purchased a self-administering website program so your web designer is going to walk away and let you do the updates. Usually the designer will fix bad code and address hosting issues if they are responsible for your hosting. Beyond that, you paid for a site that you could take over and manage yourself. Many designers will bill you for changes made to the site if it’s not a result of bad code on their part so respect their time. If you need them to come in and train an employee of yours to take over the site, expect to be charged for the time involved.
DON’T TRY TO RUN
Often a content managed site appears to be as convenient as working in a word processing program. Don’t be decieved, the complex coding that goes behind that simple interface is staggering. With that in mind, don’t expect to be able to do advanced things that require JavaScript or Flash or even complex layouts. These are things best left to professionals who can work at the code level. Not all screens display pages the same way and a professional web designer is aware of the “issues” involved when viewing a page on different screen sizes, resolution and even different browsers. While today most browsers show pages to be very similar, the difference in screen resolutions is staggering. Once we could rely on the idea that the majority of people viewed a website on a 14″ 600 x 400 resolution screen. Today resolutions vary from 800 to 1600 and screen sizes range from 15″ to 21″ and growing. In addition, with the availability of LCD monitors, colors vary widely depending on the type of LCD screen as well as analog CRTs. My advice is to “keep it simple.” It’s the message that’s important, not the sizzle.
September 16th, 2008 Edit