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InternetWideWorld.com Blog - Content Management
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# Thursday, September 20, 2007

An article located at http://etech.eweek.com/content/web_technology/top_web_developer_mistakes.html makes really good reading.  It's a slide show, but below is a condensed list of what the article says!

My additional comments are in dark blue, you got any?

1) Click, Click, Click - This is great, someone is at your site and they're ready to make a purchase. Here they go; one click, two clicks, three clicks, just one more! And.... they're gone. Maybe if they could get to where they wanted to go right away you would have made a sale. (I disagree slightly in that as long as the navigation is logical and correct then it should not matter to the user how many clicks...)

2) Just Click on the Magic Compass - It's great that new web technologies make it possible to add lots of cool new navigation and interaction techniques. But don't put access to important features and content behind a strange graphic or icon. People know how links work on web pages. Some icons might as well be in elvish.

3) Don't be too Graphic - The Following Web Content Contains Massive Image Files and Graphics That May not Be Suitable For Visitors With Anything But the Fastest Possible Internet Connections. Toning Down the Giant Graphics Files Is Advised For Site Developers. (This is becoming an increasing problem given that mobile internet is really taking off!)

4) Registry of Lost Web Sites - The legend of the Invisible Web Site. Unseen by search engines, web users or anyone who might actually use the services of the website. It uses the magic of enforced site registration to keep its valuable content hidden from all who might want to use it, especially those who want to give the owners of the site some business.

5) Sticking to the Script - Scripting languages are so useful. They make it possible to do lots of cool things in web design. Click this link for an example. Mmm, getting a script error. If only there was some other way to link to content, you know like an HTML link. Don't use scripting where HTML will work just fine.

6) Too Rich - Animation is great, when it comes to Saturday morning cartoons. On the web too many animations, Flashy graphics, spinning graphs and windows popping in your face is sort of like a sign saying, "Stay away". (100% agree)

7) Welcome To Our Site "image placeholder" - Here's a great idea for the budding web site and application developer. There's this technology that makes it possible to display information to visitors and users. It's called Text! And unlike images and animations used where text would work just as well, text will always show up.

8) What's Your Color Scheme? - Whoa, trippy man. I love the way the orange text looks on that purple background. Dude, that financial firm is just going to love this site design. Or probably not. Unless you're designing for a jam band or some other client that likes wild colors, stick to color matchings that are pleasing to everyone. (Obviously they didn't see the custom colours that I used on the TtG Brokers site ;-) )

9) Directionless Navigation - Wow, this site looks like it has lots of great content and products. But where is everything? Can't find related content? Where's that thing I saw the other day? I'm lost! Users of your web site shouldn't need a trail guide. Make navigation clean, simple and easy to find. (All computer users are very aware of hierarchical navigation [Windows Explorer] and also an address bar 'bread crumb', so play to their strengths!)

10) Can We Table This For Now? - Aren't tables great! They provide so much flexibility when laying out web content. And it looks so nice, at one specific resolution on one specific browser. At other resolutions, yuck! When using tables make good use of percentages and make sure the design looks good on all users screens.

11) Sloppy with Text - Wilcom too my grate neww web apliccatiun. Im a perfessinal web dervelper! The greatest coding skills won't help if your web content is full of misspellings and poor grammar. (Being dyslexic, I have no cammant!)

12) Click Here for Click Here - This is such a nice web application that you've built. It will really help our business deploy content to the web. And look it automatically creates links that say things like "Click Here", "More" and "Continue Reading." Now how do we change those to something more descriptive? We can't? Don't call us, we'll call you. (Use your Tool Tip and Alt tags!!!)

13) Putting up a Velvet Rope - This is such as cool web site, can I come in? Oh, you only let in people from the IE click? Us Safari geeks aren't welcome? And I was going to spend so much money. Don't you know that browser-specific web sites and applications are like so five years ago?

14) This is a Web Site, Right? - Now this is what I call a content rich site. Look at the useful information here. Let me click here, wait, this is a PDF document, and this is a Word document. I thought this was a web site, you know, something I could view in a web browser. (What is the point of providing a content managed Web site when half the content the user wants to view is hidden away in PDF and Word files?  I bet 90% or more of content in Word and PDF that are available on the internet would be easy to provide on a Web page and if it was users would read it more!)

15) Over-crowding - You know, when people say that something is like finding a needle in a haystack, they don't mean that in a good way. On the web, too many links and other components can make it hard for a visitor to find the content that they want.

Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:06:53 PM UTC  #    Comments [0]   Browser Compliance | Content Management | debug | Development | General | Internet | Web Hosting  | 
# Wednesday, May 02, 2007

In my job I create a lot of Content Management driven Web sites.  As part of this process you need to mock-up what various page templates and styles look like.  This can be a real pain to put in some valid content.  Historically I always wondered how the designers that I have worked with managed to put in lorem ipsum to the design to make it more realistic.  Well, a while ago I found the lorem ipsum Web site.

I now use this site all the time to generate some dummy test for inclusion in my mock-ups.

Some details about Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Wednesday, May 02, 2007 8:01:45 AM UTC  #    Comments [0]   Content Management | Development | Internet  | 
# Thursday, September 21, 2006

I am part of a team working on a very exciting MCMS (Microsoft Content Management Server) 2003 SP2 project.  We are using Visual Studio (VS) 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0.

The solution has been created and we are all using source control and sharing the project among many developers.  This works fine, except when I try to go to the MCMS template explorer.  I get the following error, but no others do, despite having the same build/setup:

No CMS-Enabled Projects are open

After some reading of some news groups and looking up information posted by the MCMS Gurus (Stefan Goßner, Lim Mei Ying, Joel Ward, Angus Logan), I came across the following:

To enable a MCMS project, from the menu "Website" select "Enable as MCMS Project". - This was disabled for me, so...

In the vwb.WebInfo file, make sure that you have the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<
VisualWebDeveloper>
<Globals>
<
UserProperties CmsEnabled="1"/>
</
Globals>
</
VisualWebDeveloper>

Again, my project had this!

Another suggestion was to open the project using HTTP rather than the file system.  I tried this also, but to no avail.

I then closed Visual Studio in lost hope...

Then instead of opening the project via double clicking on the solution/project, I simply opened Visual Studio up and from the "Start Page" tab, I selected the project.

Weird... it worked!

Whilst not the best solution at least it allows me to get to the MCMS Template Explorer.  In order to maintain code and source control, I still have to open the original project the original way.  Perhaps later I can find a proper solution.

Thursday, September 21, 2006 2:17:28 PM UTC  #    Comments [1]   Content Management | Contracting | debug | Development  | 

I was using MCMS (Microsoft Content Management Server) 2003's Site manager and trying to get a dependent report.  For me it wasn't working, and I couldn't figure out why.  Then it dawned on me...Popup blocker!

Site Manager is actually written using the IE (Internet Explorer) browser control.  As such, when you select to open a Dependent report it is in actual fact opening up a child window.  Therefore, if in IE you have a popup blocker enabled the dependent report will be blocked.

So, to get around this problem, simply disable the popup blocker temporarily!

Thursday, September 21, 2006 10:30:58 AM UTC  #    Comments [0]   Development | Content Management  | 
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