I've been writing HTML and creating web sites since 1993 when our ISP, Wimsey, first put up a web server. During 1993-1995 I taught many people who have since gone on to become leading web creators in the Vancouver area. I, on the other hand, am not well known for the sites that I create, and there's a reason for this; I'm lazy and in constant need of different challenges to keep me challenged.
The vast majority of web sites I've created over the past 15+ years have been designed to allow the customers to make changes to them and continue to grow them. They have all used some sort of content management facility, from Frontpage, prior to and following it being purchased by Microsoft, to some hand-crafted and site-specific ones, to the latest crop of PHP driven systems such as Drupal, Geeklog and GlFusion, ELGG, and various WIKI packages.
You see, very early on I realized that for a business to be found on the web among all the other similar sites it would have to continue to grow and change - and that this growth and change would cost the customer a lot of money if they got me to do it since I value my time fairly highly and charge accordingly. It was far better for their site to be built and modified through some process that fit into their established ways of dealing with marketing information creation; thus I tailored their site updates to come from their typical information generation cycle and be entered/updated by their staff or other marketing personnel directly. At most, I or another web-aware person would visit the site and address consistency and overall format issues.
This topic covers the CMS arena from the point of view of utility and methods every bit as much as how and why.
In playing around with the default font size for a site I noticed that the drop-downs on the top horizontal menu were no longer properly lining up.
A bit of sleuthing shows that this width is hard coded at 177px, whereas to work correctly it really should be relative to the font size.
A bit of playing around in /private/plugins/sitetailor/templates/custom/gl_horizontal-cascading.thtml (make a copy of the file from the directory above custom) turned the line:
width:177px;
to
width:14.6em;
One of the more valuable plugins or native facilities of a CMS (Content Management System) is the "Meta Tag" facility.
A "Meta Tag" is a part of the HTML of a page that is not generally human readable. It is there for the benefit of machines that read the page and interpret its contents. The tag might tell the machine what character set to display the page in, if the page has been moved - and how to find the new page, if the page is the "original or canonical" name of the page rather than one of possibly several different names - so the search engines don't index the page more than once and lower the search ranks because of duplicate content. Or the Meta tag can be information about the page so the search engines correctly categorize the page and show a reasonable description.
This latter type of tag is what I'll talk about in this article - the Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags.
Don't get me wrong - I love having my customers work with their Content Managed Systems (CMS) - their sites are active, alive, and higher ranked than a similar static site would be. It relieves me of much of the drudge-work of being a webmaster - the minor syntax and spelling fixes, changes in staff information, etc. and lets me concentrate on some of the other things that I and my staff enjoy doing.
The problem is not with my customers - it's with some of the people I see on the various CMS support lists who simply don't have a clue how a web site goes together. We're not talking about content or graphics or what the web viewer sees - we're talking about things like style sheets, changes to templates and web server setup and tuning. These things are very technical in nature and a lot of people fail to grasp that in some cases it takes literally years of experience to know how to get the best out of them and make the rest of the system function correctly. I know, I have more experience in much of this than most people and I still get baffled by some of the problems I come across.
Yesterday I pointed you at a lecture by Clay Shirky about some of the outfall of the dying of newspapers. I'd read a bit by Shirky before but got digging around in his blog and came across an item that put into words a concept that I've been trying to teach to my web customers over the past couple of years.
Shirky's Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags elegantly explains why some/many web sites need to forget, or at least not be too pedantic about, correctly categorizing via the topics and other directional methods (menus, directories, sitemaps, etc.) the information they accumulate. You see, unlike libraries where the card catalog is the key to finding where on the shelves a particular book is, the internet has no shelves and the index (search engines) can find anything on any page of any site far easier than you can find a book in the card catalog, and the internet can show you the page and (a lot) more like it faster than you can get to the shelf for a single book.
So you've made the decision to move your site to a CMS and have gone ahead and done it. The site is growing, and you have new features you want to promote to visitors. You want to lower the "bounce" rate (% of people who look at one page and then "bounce" out of your site to somewhere else) so your site's overall page views goes up, even if the number of people coming to the site does not grow (we'll grow it in another article). How can you do this?
One way is to use the automated structure of the CMS to put random ads about your site's features in front of viewers. Lee Garner's Banner Plugin for glFusion is an excellent way to do this. Other CMSs have similar functions, or you can make use of the OpenX advertising software to do it too.
If you are going to attract and retain viewers (and hopefully customers) to your web site you need to not only ensure it has what the viewers want, but that they can find, and find out about, what it contains.
A content managed web site has the potential to grow quite large. Some of my customers have sites with hundreds and even thousands of pages accumulated over a period of years. Others of course have sites with large numbers of products and the description pages for those products. Your site may not start out all that large, but you need to be prepared to give your viewers information about what it contains and why they should visit other parts than the one or two pages they've found themselves.
My daughter-in-law has been struggling with the creation of a couple of new web sites, one for her boss' business and one for her seasonal wreath business she shares with her mother.
She's been doing all the design using a Windows-based graphics program, then writing the content and doing page layouts on her mother's laptop - for more than a month now.
Last week I sat her down beside me and created her wreath site for her - in about 1/2 hour from start to finish.
OK - to be sure, it was nothing like what she thought she wanted but then again, it was up, running, submitted to the search engines and available for her to chop and change and add content from anywhere on the internet she could log in from. She didn't have to have the page layout software on the computer she used - in this case borrowed from her mother - so was not tied in time or place. A standard web browser enabled system was all - and I know she has one at home because she loves the Linux system I gaver her earlier this year but that's another story.
Anyway, she loves it! Her own is not yet finished as I write this because she's spending all her time on the new one for her boss - but it's farther ahead than it was before last week - because the search engines have already been and she has a site rank and is on her way.
In Part 1 of this tale we moved content from one glFusion site to another by hand, copying the articles one at a time and doing minor edits. Took about an hour from start to finish.
In this part we take a fairly large site and move its content to another site using a database backup and a few other tricks. We're talking about 2000+ articles this time so doing manual copying is not an option.
The original site is www.centa.com - the Taxman's main web site where he has been accumulating answers to tax and immigration questions since about 1998. In 2007 I put together a Geeklog-powered site, tax.centa.com, that was a test the tools and techniques of moving to a databased content management system from the original Frontpage powered one. There were two reasons for this:
So for a time I was putting updates into both the www.centa.com site using the scripts I'd written many years earlier - and into tax.centa.com as well using some new scripts. This resulted in some duplication but not as much as you might suspect since I was only doing some of the postings - splitting them across the two systems.
The tests were successful - so it was now time to consolidate the two sites back into the www.centa.com domain.
I've been using some form of content manager for years now - it's really the only way to easily allow the owner of a site to make daily or periodic changes to their site without incurring huge webmaster fees - and changing contents on a site is the ONLY long-term proven way to keep your site's position on the search engines!
Most of the sites I do personally today (I oversee lots of systems and sites but these are the ones I personally work on and put together) are done with either Geeklog, or the "fork" of this open source software calle glFusion
Over the years I've created several such sites for my own writings and musings - and today I decided it was about time I simply consolidated them under the one domain, Digital-Rag.com - which I recently acquired after many years of it's being owned by a paper-making company. You see I'd used the "Digital Rag" as the name of my first webzine while we had our ISP, Wimsey.com and had had to settle for it as a sub-domain or just the masthead of the various incarnations it had gone through over the years. Well, today they're all being consolidated and I want to share with you how I'm doing it.
By rights this belongs on either the Digital-Rag or on my Blog. Maybe I'll copy it there too - it is a lesson in the evolution of the internet and web sites but it specifically is about my own personal trek, so here is where it starts.
This (richard.pacdat.net) web site is the latest of many sites I've been involved in to move from one of the first "page generation" web production facilities to one of the latest crop of open-source CMS systems. The old system was Frontpage from Microsoft, starting with Frontpage98 and progressing through to Frontpage 2002. Prior to that I did all sites by hand, crafting HTML with a text editor. The evolution of page creation systems progressed quickly. Today we have things like Adobe's DreamWeaver and all manner of others - but when I started looking there really wasn't much to choose from. In fact, one of the first major sites I was involved in was a re-publishing of material originally set up for a paper catalogue and we had to write software for it from scratch to make it viable.
This one site created about 5000 new pages of content, all interlinked and with menus, etc., each week - real estate listings. The software we put together for this one purpose took in the publisher's file and put out all the new pages in about 2 minutes elapsed time - and this was on hardware that was vintage 1994 - Pentium 90s and such. But this was a "one-off" project - not useable for other sites - but a portent of things to come it turned out. It created a whole site in 2 minutes once per week from a primitive database. Today's CMS systems do individual pages on demand from a SQL database.
I wanted something that would keep the menus straight as pages were added manually, much as the automated system re-built the menus each week. I'd hand-tweeked the old Digital Rag menus each month and was not looking forward to having to teach others how to do them. A couple of years went by where I was too busy with being MIS manager and doing marketing for others. The next time I looked the crop had grown a bit - but most still didn't do what I wanted. Then Microsoft purchased a product from a small company, Vermeer, called FrontPage.
I chose Frontpage because at the time I could not find anything that came even close to the utility it had for allowing otherwise untrained HTML editors (webmasters) to edit and update a site once it was initially laid out. All the hosting I've done of these sites has been on Unix/Linux systems - where the orginal web grew up, and Microsoft had created a kit that allowed Apache to do what was necessary on the server to deal with things like authentication of external editors (without having to add them to the underlying system's password system) and various extra facilities such as indexing and search update without creating special scripts and such. Microsoft's own server, IIS, was only just starting to be created at that time.
You see, even back in the late '90s I was telling people that just having a "static" web site - really nothing more than an online brochure - was not going to be enough to attract and keep the attention of the potential customers and the various methods they would use to find the sites. Search engines were just starting to crawl the web, indexing it for search. The basic premise was that if a site remained the same, then the engine did not come back as frequently. If it had changed each time the crawler came, then the crawler came more often.
Allowing and encouraging people to add content consistently to their site was the intention. By building a "magazine" style of site - similar to my first site, the Digital Rag at Wimsey, the episodic nature of many businesses and organizations built up a huge following and history of information and comment.
This was before the advent of social sites where all and sundry are encouraged to come to the site and contribute.
Today we go much farther...
Feed from the Whole Site