06.08.21 | Tagged as: Insight
One of the most common things we hear from clients is that they’re often tentative about publishing new content.
Fortunately, the web is a very forgiving medium.
What you see today, isn’t what you have to see tomorrow, or indeed in the next few minutes.
Of course we want to get things right first time, but if we don’t, no big deal. Everything can be fixed.
Websites have none of the problems of traditional media. When a Graphic Designer creates a large brochure and sends it off to print, there are no second chances.
How do our websites address these issues?
Websites, like most things in life, are only as complicated as their maker, makes them. And boy can they be complicated.
However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
A simple naming convention is vital in a CMS.
When you’re about to add some text, we helpfully name that field text. We don’t call it ‘copy’ or ‘content’ or something ambiguous.
However, should you prefer to call it something different, then of course that is possible. Whatever makes it easiest for you.
We always recommend that a few hours are set aside for training.
We know that people learn best by doing, so you’ll dive straight in to creating pages under our guidance.
You can ask us questions in real time and get immediate feedback.
For starters our websites give you the ability to save your work as a draft.
This essentially allows you to look at your page without anyone else having access to it.
Maybe you want one of your colleagues to take a look at your page before you go ahead and make it live.
Simple. Password protect the page and share the password with one or more users.
Once everyone is happy, then the page can be published.
Although you can conceivably layout your pages in a multitude of ways, there will of course be pages that you’ve already worked hard on and prefer to others.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could clone these but replace the content?
Instead of reworking the wheel each time, which of course you can do too, our websites do allow you to clone pages.
This can be a big time saver and lets you focus on the content of the page as opposed to the structure, which we know is already desirable from previously published content.
If you’ve updated a page in error or don’t like what you’ve done then you can manually back out those changes, or, simply roll back to the previous version of the page.
Whilst we’re taking about publishing and drafts, it’s also worth mentioning that content can be published automatically.
Let’s say you’re going on holiday and want to keep your website looking active during that time by publishing new content. By creating the content in advance and setting the published date in the future, i.e. when you’re relaxing by the pool, you can automatically publish that content.
This could also be particularly handy for a big announcement where you create the page in advance and know exactly when it needs to be published. Auto publishing ensures the content goes out at exactly the right time and if you happen to be ill or stuck in a traffic jam on your way to work then you can rest assured that your page will still go live when it needs too!
We know that clients can be hesitant about creating new content.
Be that a bad experience with a previous CMS or an assumption that a great deal of technical knowledge is required.
The barriers to doing this are often a complicated CMS (Content Management System) or being unsure of how a newly created page is going to look.
Our websites and training ALWAYS address both of these issues.
That’s great news because generating new content is a proven SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy. Google loves fresh content in terms of your overall ranking!
