I came to company where I work 2.5 years ago. My previous background was creating web sites for small and midsize businesses. So I was aware about challenges people face when updating their websites and what most websites need from CMS (easy interactions, flexibility and so on).
We decided to redesign our website. I've done research to find nice CMS for Windows platform and I was not satisfied with what I found. In 2 weeks we developed first version of our CMS. Now, 2.5 years later it is 3rd version and it has grown from in-house product to commercial product with tens of websites using it with many addons (webstore, MS RMS sync, Subscriptions, Form builder, Mass mailing and so on). Those lessons I've learned working on it: * It should look good and be appealing and attractive to user . 2nd version was stylish gray/black/orange and people didnt really like it, however designers were excited about it. * Ajax does make sense. Users initially spend a lot of time with Sitemap tool, building structure of their website, that's why we've added full ajax support to it so they dont wait for page to load after each action. * Help users to start quickly . We've added small 4-5 steps overviews to each section of CMS to answer most frequent questions. They are automatically activated with first usage. It significantly minimized support efforts. * Provide flexibility. No matter how well you've documented website requirements, some time later client will ask about new features for the website and CMS should be ready to support it. * If your CMS doesnt support something, modify your CMS, dont make clients log in somewhere else to do changes to their websites. * Provide ability to preview changes to content online without actual saving them. * Let users revert to previous version of content in case something will go wrong. * If client doesnt need something (Member Management, for example, when they dont have registration on their website) -- dont show it in CMS. * Let client know their visitors better (provide report of what have been searched on the site, for example) * Dont limit web developers using your CMS to your own template system or custom script language. Our developers use ASP.net (with all it's features, templates etc.) to build front end websites. * Think not only about CMS <-> Client interactions, but about CMS <-> Developer interaction (but it's more for CMS backend developers) -- Best regards, Maxim ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
