content management for web sites

Keeping the material on a web site up to date is very important. It helps to ensure you provide the most accurate and persuasive information to current and potential customers. And it can also help improve your search engine rankings.

Whilst we are very happy to handle updates on behalf of our clients, some clients will want the ability to update content themselves whenever they like. We offer two levels of content management functionality.

simple edits

Simple amendments to the text and pictures on a web site can usually be handled using Adobe Contribute. This claims to be one of the simplest methods for editing web site pages. The approach is very intuitive:

browse to the page you want to edit
edit the page
publish the edited page

We recommend Contribute for basic editing tasks because it has these features:

easy to use
WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing - like using a word processor such as Microsoft Word
it can work with the templates we create for a site. This helps to ensure that only certain parts of the site can be edited and it can prevent accidental changes to other items such as navigation menus
locking of pages being edited so that other users can't try simultaneously to edit the same page
rollback versions of edited pages so you can restore an earlier version if you make a mistake

However, if you do not already own Contribute, you will need to purchase a copy - the price is currently around £120.00.

Here's an example of a site that our client updates using Contribute: view the 2 Gems site.

content management system

Some clients require more than simple text and picture editing. Sites with larger numbers of pages may want to store these in a database to enable more options for displaying that content.

Interact can build web sites using a powerful and easy to use content management system (CMS) with these features:

hierarchy of sections, categories and individual articles
articles are stored in a database
display of articles is controlled from administration area - for example, how many articles should be displayed on a page
can display in blog format - a list of article headlines and click to see the full article
search function
surveys
random picture
latest news
static and dynamic pages
WYSIWYG editing of content
upload new photographs
set publishing start and end dates for individual articles
control the access rights of different user groups and individual users
- author can write new content
- editor can write and edit new content
- publisher controls what gets published on the site
users can be required to log in or the site can be open access
send emails to users
control page titles and header tags to improve search engine rankings

example of a content managed site

Interact has designed a site for The Cumberland & Westmorland Herald - the weekly newspaper for North and East Cumbria.

This new site uses a content-management system and the web database has been linked to the Herald's in-house systems. Stories being written for the newspaper can simply be copied into folders on the in-house system, which are regularly synchronised with the web site. In addition, about 120,000 news stories from the last 10 years have been uploaded into the web database, providing a fascinating resource for anyone researching local issues.

View the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald site.