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Updating your Content.
Article written by Chris Nielsen
One of the questions I ask when we first discuss the website project with our customers is "how will this site be updated"? The internet has changed quite a bit, at one time a static non interactive site was fine. What was commonly known as a "business card" website has begun to phase out. Now business are starting to focus their website on what it is intended to do. Bring in customers.
How do you start making your site interactive to your customer? A good place to start is to dynamically provide changing content that your customer will want to see on a regular basis. You can see this with small updates like "latest News", "upcoming events", and other dated content item that a customer would like to see daily or weekly. This can be accomplished with a couple methods.
1. If you have a designer at your beck and call or have mad dreamweaver skills you can update and control the news and other changing content by updating it yourself. This can have limitations as you cannot do it from any where and if you spend all your time learning how to create and edit a website, you cannot concentrate on the business you are in.
2. A content system is available to install on a dynamic website. These systems are dynamic in that the content is stored in a database and is retrieved by your customer when they open the website or ask for information through a form. The content system will allow a website adminstrator to login online and make changes to specific sections of the website at anytime. This allows for a lot of flexabliity.
3. Another common method we have used is a Macromedia product called contribute. Working in Dreamweaver our designers can limit access to certain sections of the websites so the main template stays in tact, but the customer can use contribute to update the website from their PC.
At Nielsen Design we use several content systems that allow for updating the site not just in the news sections but provide the ability to update any page you wish to update. These considerations need to be an important part of the design and scope of the project when started.
