Content Management System' quite literally allows you to control and manage the content within your web site - without technical training. Using this uncomplicated system you can very easily add, delete images and edit the text in your web site on the fly. You can also have an unlimited number of pages and a full site-search engine.
Compared to designing for static content (print or web), designing for CMS-output is an entirely different discipline. It requires a big-picture systems-thinking approach that might best be described as architecture.
What is a good CMS design?
- Accommodates the needs of content and navigation regardless of length.
- Considers not just the present, but future needs and growth.
- Exemplifies page-to-page consistency in element placement, type, colours, and imagery.
- Defines a set of standards that are broad enough to accommodate current and future content needs, but strict enough to maintain strong site-wide consistency. Navigation that makes it clear where you are, where you came from, what’s related, and how to go elsewhere.
- Retains its identity and consistency regardless of what text it contains or how it’s scaled.
- Understands and uses the limitations of XHTML/HTML5 as an asset.
- Developed in an accessible, web standards-friendly way that properly defines and uses markup.
What is bad CMS design?
- Layouts designed as if they were for print.
- Layouts that make assumptions about the maximum and minimum length of copy.
- Headlines, navigation or copy requiring [non-dynamic] images or flash.
- Layouts with ambiguous navigation.
- Design that fails to accommodate the stylistic needs of future content, forcing the client to come up with his/her own (often inappropriate) solutions.
- Layouts that don’t consider the effects of text-wrapping.
- Designs that are poorly developed (this can make or break it, no matter how good the actual design is).
- Designs output by a CMS that gives the client too much stylistic control.
No comments:
Post a Comment