My Thoughts

In my capacity as web designer at White Gate Design I have recently completed a long term web design project for The King's School, Canterbury. The project involved a complete redesign of the site to bring the project inline with the schools existing corporate identity and print material. The previous website was old, and had become time consuming to maintain. From the outset as well as a redesign of the website, it was decided that the school would benefit from a content management system to help the school manage the website's content.

The King's School project was my first website that used a content management system, although I have been involved in web design projects that use content management systems, this has always been an area others members of the team deal with. Normally my designs are used for the front end and the content management system is integrated into my designed templates. Whereas this project would mean I had a much more involved role in using the content management system after the templates were built.

At the beginning of the project I new there was a serious learning curve ahead of me, but now after completing the project, the knowledge I have gained will be invaluable for future projects. As it is predicted that content management driven websites will increase significantly over the next few years, these new skills will hopefully serve as a good foundation for the future.

The content management system used by the King's School website is provided by Edeptive™. Working alongside Andrew Bailey and Neil Perry from Edeptive to build the website was a real pleasure. The Edpetive™ content management system is so powerful, easy to use and the support throughout the project from Edeptive™ was first rate. As a result the new content management system will enable the schools non-technical staff to easily and efficiently manage their website, keeping content current, and of interest to pupils, teachers, parents and prospective visitors to the school.

The website utillises the Edeptive Gallery system and a sophisticated Calendar which uses the latest web technology to deliver a highly functional event diary. Microsoft Vista users are able to add a Kings Calendar Gadget to their desktop to easily keep up to date with forthcoming events.

For those of you who are not familiar with content management systems, let me enlighten you, a content management system, often abbreviated to (CMS) is a web application or software used for content management.

A content management system facilitates the organisation, control, and publication of a large number of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. Content management systems are ideal when collaborative creation of documents is required. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to websites.

Web content management systems are usually used for storing, controlling and publishing specific documentation such as news articles, upcoming events, technical manuals, and marketing brochures.

Web content management systems are more than just a way of managing documents, a web content management system is a computer system used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of web material (HTML documents and their associated images).

A web content management system provides the following key features:

Automated Templates
Standard page design templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content.

Easily Editable Content
Having content separate from the visual presentation of your website, makes editing much easier and quicker. Most content management software include WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content.

Scalable Modules
Most content management systems have plug-ins or modules that can be easily installed to extend an existing website's functionality.

Web Standards Upgrades
Content management systems usually receive regular updates that include new features and keep the system up to current web standards.

Workflow Management
Workflow is the process of creating a system of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the content management system. For example, a content author submits a news item, but it is not published on the website until the content editor cleans it up, and the editor-in-chief approves it.

Document Management
Content management systems provide a means of managing the life cycle of a piece of content, from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction.

Hopefully this explanation has given you a better understanding of what a content management system is, and what it could do for you or your organisation.