Content Management For Web Designers - Quick Reference Sheet

Web Widgets is the perfect content management solution for web designers and graphic designers.

You do the design, then you/we import that design into our CMS, then let the customer take control of their content or shopping cart.

Users can only edit the "content" of each page using a "word" style editor.
Experienced web designers can create their own HTML templates or traditional print/graphics designers can use our "editable banner templates".
Pages have natural URLs, eg www.webwidgets.co.nz/contact.html . In the rename area for each page, just specify any "save as filename" you like eg "contact.html"
SEO meta tags are editable by user or SEO expert using a friendly wizard interface.
Only the web designer can edit the "Template" which is just an HTML page with the word [CONTENT] where the content should go
Put [HEADING] where you want a heading to go. You should optimumly put an <h1> tag around it and use CSS to style it, but that is upto you. If you don't want to use a dynamic heading on each page, please consider the issues of the end user. In the long run they need to be able to add new pages and products. The product pages expect the heading to exist, and without it, the product page might read badly.
Put [MENULEFT] or [MENUTOP] where the menu should go. Menus should optimumly be designed using CSS over a LI list item menu (classname=menu) so that the end user will be able to add/remove pages. We will auto generate the menu, so if your CSS expects the industry standard LI menu, then thats what we provide you. We can also set the active LI and active A tags with a different classname if you want to do something special. Please do not create any other format of static menu, nor second level menus without the customers express permission. (A static menu is any menu that is not a LI menu. Static menus including flash/images/HTML)
A second menu is not normally allowed, but can be used for shopping cateogries. These are similar to the main menu, but the outter classname=catmenu and the template code is [CATEGORIES]
Page templates are different to site design templates. The most common page template is a free format "single plain page" which is similar to using a "Word" style editor. In addition, we have shopping carts, forums, and galleries with automated thumbnailing. You should use the custom web widgets templates only when the content is most suited to that purpose.
You can have upto 7 site templates, plus splash pages can be setup as a "Full HTML" page template which does not use a site template at all.
Stylesheets should be named style.css and kept in the root directory.
You can access any template or most content in HTML mode by clicking the HTML tab, or click Design to go back to WYSIWYG mode.
Images should be kept in an "/images" folder in the root directory. All images on all pages should be accessed using a root relative path, eg src="/images/myimage.jpeg"
In addition to heading H1,H2,H3 etc styles, you can predefine upto 6 special styles for ordinary text and paragraphs. These are good if you want the customer to be able to put borders around paragraphs for example.
If you have a big website, you can FTP the images and related files up.
Galleries, thumbnails and catalogues can be automatically generated from directories of photos. So just FTP these photos up. Our templates will create the thumbnails and page navigation automatically. We have several different gallery and slideshow formats, otherwise it costs about $500 to integrate your customised page template with our system.
Our CMS is now compatible with Windows and Mac, on all common internet browsers including IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari.

Important Design Tips for 3rd Party Web Designers, Where most go wrong is here:

Please create CSS menus, so that the customer will have a dynamic menu that they can add/remove pages. Preferably ensure your CSS menu copes with nested lists, which are used for dropdown menus. eg using CSS to styalise an unordered list of links... eg <div id=menu><ul class=nav><li><a></a></ul></div>
If you create your menu using images or javascript, or if you create separate secondary menus, then your menu will essentially be static, and the end user will never be able to add/remove pages from the menu themselves, without coming back to the designer. This is ok for some designers, but it should be clear to the end user who may be expecting this functionality automatically. If you are ok with static menus, then you can utliise the 7 site templates to create the necessary variations between your site templates, eg to change a 3rd column of text or background imagery on a page by page or section basis.
RESERVED CSS CLASSNAMES - Do not use the BODY or CONTENT classnames or IDs. Please do not use CLASS=CONTENT at all, because this is our tag. If you add padding to your content tag, then it will be duplicated on ours. Meaning your template will not display as intended. Although it is common for designers to place a background image or colour or text alignment on the BODY tag, please don't. Just add another DIV tag called CONTAINER and assign your alignment and additional options to that. You need to do this, because we use your stylesheet to format the users content when they are entering content... So you cannot assume that your design elements will exist. Your stylesheet should be written so that the template can be displayed without the content, and also so the content can be displayed without depending on any containers. Following these rules will ensure that your first design will not be rejected. You can optionally set the background image and colours as HTML body elements and we will pick it up during the setup.
Do not worry about margin=0 on body, this is automatic for our templates. Please do not set it in your CSS, as this will takeaway the margins when users are editing their content. We must consider the future issues
If your design requires a specific version of HTML rendering, please be clear about this.

Important Tips for Customers of 3rd Party Web Designers

Make sure your requirements for a dynamic menu are clear to the web designer. Your webdesigner must use a CSS menu in order that you have the ability to add/remove pages yourself on an ongoing basis.
Make sure your designer does not provide a 2nd level menu. Only 1 menu can be dynamic. The only exception to this is a 2nd menu can be included for product categories.
If you intend to have submenus or a large site, make sure your designer knows to allow for dropdown/pushout css menus
Make sure your designer has read this whole page prior to doing your design work. If there are any modifications required to support elements/dynamic menus that they did not allow for, then the setup price may change, or the design rejected.