Ten4 Content Management

Since December 2009 we've been busy working on an update to our content management system, and this spring we began rolling it out across our latest projects. The reaction from our clients has been great and we're really happy with the results.

For those of you who don't know, a content management system (or CMS for short) allows our clients to update their websites themselves after it has launched. Through their web browser they can login to the CMS and add/edit content on the site without any prior knowledge of web development or HTML (although we do guide them on some best practices).

We had a number of objectives on this update, which we’d like to share with you:

• Create a new user interface that is simple and intuitive to use
• Easily tailor the CMS and its functionality to the site's content requirements
• Create a robust media management system that is easily accessible throughout the CMS

Create a new user interface that is simple and intuitive to use

Keeping a website up-to-date through a CMS can sometimes be a little overwhelming, so we wanted to make the process as simple and intuitive as possible. We completely re-designed our user interface for that purpose, restructuring the navigation into sensible groupings and displaying content in an easily accessible way.

We designed a clean uncluttered interface, with key interactions clearly highlighted. We wanted to aid scanning of the pages, so broke down long forms by grouping related information together. We also wanted to ensure consistency, so the important controls on each page are in the same place throughout the system.

We conducted user research on early prototypes of the system to iron out unfriendly aspects and identify where our clients thought it behaved in an unexpected way.

The result is a clear, easy to use and logical interface.

Easily tailor the CMS and its functionality to the site's content requirements

Every website is different. We wanted to build a CMS that we could tailor to the requirements of each project, making it super simple for our clients to use.

Once logged in, content can be added via simple forms that prompt for the information required. Handy tool-tips are available throughout, providing explanations of how the information being added will be used on the site.

Required and optional content is clearly highlighted and once an article is published, it can be jumped to on the site (to see it in action). The interface is the same throughout, so once a user has published their first article, they should be able to use the rest of the CMS with ease.

We can hide any functionality that a client doesn't need, keeping the interface focused. The CMS will also keep a copy of previously saved content, so any articles can be rolled back to their previous states.

Sometimes websites need to be edited by more than one person. The CMS allows us to create multiple users with differing permissions for adding and editing content.

Some of our clients have a global audience and need to provide content in multiple languages, so we have developed our CMS to accommodate this. Using a simple control panel in our CMS, common content across the site can be localised (menus, footers, login screens and so on) and when publishing content, assign it with a certain language.

Create a robust media management system that is easily accessible

Images, audio and video are being used more and more on the web so we designed a "media panel" that is available throughout the CMS, for clients to easily add media content to their site.

A library of previously uploaded media assets is available and it is easy to upload new assets at any time. Once uploaded, imagery can be cropped, resized and rotated from within the system.

The CMS can also import media from external sites like YouTube & Vimeo, it can also "scrape" images from preexisting website (helpful when importing content from an old site). We also built-in support for multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Akamai and Amazon S3 and can add support for your own CDN if required.

Want to know more?

This is just a taster of some of the features and tools available in our new CMS. If you'd like more information, get in touch and we'd be happy to give you a full demonstration.

Feature List

• Simple easy to use interface
• Multiple users with different permissions for editing content
• Multi-lingual support - create a site in multiple languages
• Media Manager - access your media from anywhere in the system from a single library
• Multi-site support - manage more than one site from a single installation
• SSL Support - keep your site secure, the CMS can run on SSL