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lol
Agreed, ok slightly mistook what you were saying. Probably cos most CMS I have seen is built for non technical users yet is truly baffling in its interface. And all content management whoever its for should have effective UI.
> UI design? Niklas?
I wasn't suggesting he do the talk ;)
Paul Johnston wrote:
- see footer for list info -<On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 08:46, Damian Watson wrote:
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CFUG suggestion... someone to talk about CMS design methods.
Reasons for suggestion:
* too many CMS I've seen are perplexing for the user (Paul I take
your point but disagree, CMS should be for non-technical users,
techie stuff can be added for special authorised tech heads)
Red Rag - Bull I never said that a CMS shouldn't be for non-techie users, just that the purpose of a CMS is managing content (hence why it is called a Content Management System). Why would ANYONE pay serious shedloads of cash for a high-powered CMS that requires lots and lots of training (various oracle products come to mind) when they could just do it themselves? To be honest, most of the money for the higher end CMS products comes out of training and support. So, you build something and include training and support!!!
It all comes down to when talking about web CMS products, what does the client want? To be honest, I've never seen a client say "I want to be able to go to the site, and if I don't like something have a word interface to change it" although I've heard clients say "I want to change things in word, and it just work on the site". It's mostly developers who think this situation is important.
With a Web CMS, most clients say (paraphrased) "I want to be able to change stuff (Content) on the site, add pages, images, documents (etc), and maintain a consistent look and feel". When you hand them a tool where you can change the actual look of the page in the site, that *doesn't* in my book say "this is for non-techies" that says "this is for designers". If you stuck one of those tools in front of me, for my company, I'd walk away and not pay for it. Why? Because it's too complicated. I have to think about design and everything else. Whereas, if you say "change/add text here, it appears on the site" it's FAR LESS COMPLEX. Changing content is NOT about changing the site, it's about changing the CONTENT.
(Rant almost over)
In the end, if we push a product, that's what they will buy (if they buy
at all from us). If someone wrote a website CMS tool only using Word,
they'd be ROLLING in it! Why? Because everyone knows Word, everyone has
Word and it will be a small jump to adding a Web CMS to it. It's not a
website CMS tool, it's a word processing tool. BUT it's a smaller jump
than "Here you go! Just login, and you can move anything around and
stick anything on the page you want".
Remember, clients are not always the best judges/users/pickers of a CMS.
* most of us I bet have had to debug/ rebuild someone else's CMS and
lost a lot of hair
What we're talking about is standardised tools here. Most CMSs I have come across have been "I built this 3 years ago and copied it" or "I built this one using this methodology". Where I'm coming from is the full website creation (Enterprise) CMS tools if you will.
One of the biggest failures I see is not necessarily in the code but in the UI- when it comes to admin sites they throw the designer overboard. A talk for programmers about CMS interface design + CMS architecture design would be really useful I think (Niklas?).
UI design? Niklas? ;)
I actually think a talk on design rules for websites would be good though!
Paul
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