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I thought a great conclusion for our series on content management would be a video walkthrough of the soon-to-be-released datAvenger Pro 5.
Here’s how to log in, edit a page, create a form, and upload files (all in less than seven minutes).
For more information about datAvenger Pro, please visit our content management page.
Every once and a while, I get asked “do I really need a website”. Most of the time, this question comes from owners of a small business that is owner operated or has just a few employees. The short answer I often give, “no, you don’t need one, but it’s a something you should do if at all possible”.
Here are the benefits of a basic “brochure site”.
Search engines, this is the biggest benefit by far. Your site and information about your business can be found in search results by google, bing, and the like.
Your basic information, such as hours, phone number, and address can been found. Years ago, the yellow pages was the way your information was found. Most people will not use the yellow pages, but rather, an internet search to find such information.
Mapping sites like google maps and bing maps, will be able to show your business location on their maps, assuming your site is properly built.
Creditability is important to any business, and a business with a site will look more credible then a business without one.
24 hours a day, 365 days a year, your customers and potential customers will know how to find you.
Domain names are easy to remember. Lets say you have a plumbing business, with a phone number 311-555-2368, that is a lot of digits to remember, 10 digits. If the domain is FredKimPlumbing.com, that’s 3 words, much easier to remember.
An example brochure site, Antiquity Tile.
As we’ve been covering over the last week, we’re launching datAvenger Pro 5, the latest version of our advanced content management system, within the next few weeks. Before we launch, though, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at some of the great new features in this version.
datAvenger Pro has supported search engine friendly page addresses since we launched version 4 in 2006. A normal version 4 address would look something like this:
http://www.example.com/content/4052/Visit_Our_Store/
We decided to step it up a bit by making page addresses in dA Pro 5 even easier to read — and even better for search engines. When you’re editing a page in dA Pro 5, there’s a new option to create a custom URL that’ll look like this:
http://www.example.com/visit-our-store
At Sephone we’re committed to creating the best experience possible for your site’s visitors. We also do everything we can to stay on top of the latest guidance from search engines to make sure you’re a step above your competition. That’s why we’ve constantly refined page URLs in both datAvenger Pro and our basic content manager, datAvenger.
Companies who use datAvenger Pro have told us they love our easy-to-use, drag-and-drop form editor. It eliminates the difficult process of building forms; instead, you pick the field type you’d like to add, drag it into the big form area, and your form is ready to go.
We’ve heard that datAvenger Pro users would love to be able to add more than one field per line in order to keep forms compact and less rigid. datAvenger Pro 5′s form module does just that: you can now add as many fields per line as you like.
datAvenger Pro 4 allowed you to specify what keywords and description you’d like to include in the metadata for each page. In version 5, we’ve added the option to add an image. This is perfect for those times when people share your site’s pages on sites like Facebook, allowing you to add an eye-catching graphic into feeds on social networks.
When you first go to edit a page, sometimes you want an at-a-glance look at what’s contained on that page. In dA Pro 5, not only will you be able to see a preview of every page’s content, but you’ll also see a count of the number of words, fields, or submissions for every page. We hope these small tweaks will allow you to see a better picture of your site.
Personally, my favorite new feature of datAvenger Pro 5 is our new assets area. Assets are all the stuff you upload to your site: images, documents, and media. Our new assets area is filterable by content type. It’s searchable by keyword. It’s sortable by name or upload date. It allows tags to find your assets even faster. It includes thumbnails of images right in the asset list. And best of all: we’ve included drag-and-drop uploading for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari users. That’s right: all you need to do to upload files to your site is to drag them from a folder on your computer onto the assets list in your datAvenger admin area. Simple as that!
Version 5 is a huge new release of datAvenger Pro, and we’re really excited about all the new functionality we’ve been able to include. If you’d like more information about when you can upgrade your dA Pro site to version 5 – or if you’d like to know more about moving your site to datAvenger – we’d be happy to talk with you!
As we have already mentioned, shortly Sephone will under going some server changes in the coming weeks. Tentatively planned to start February 24. We will migrate a few servers at a time for a few weeks.
Well there are several reasons, we will try to outline a few.
Did you know that the lastest version of datAvenger Service has Google Analytics support to help you track site visitors and see trends of what’s happening on your site, and the best part is it’s super easy to setup. To start you need to go to google.com/analytics and setup the analytics account. Once you have setup the analytics account, you need to get the code to put on your site: it usually looks like this:
<br />
<script type="text/javascript"><br />
var _gaq = _gaq || [];<br />
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxx-x');<br />
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);</p>
<p>(function() {<br />
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;<br />
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';<br />
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);<br />
})();<br />
</script><br />
You can find it in your Google Analytics Control Panel. Follow these screenshots:
Click the settings icon on the right side of the dashboard navigation bar.
Click Tracking Code tab
Copy Code from step 2 on this page
Now that you have the tracking code go into your datAvenger service admin area. Click the setting tab, then click tools, and paste your Google Analytics code into the box provided for Google Analytics. Click save and now your site will track the user’s behavior while on they are visiting the site.
Seems that lately, everybody is talking about QR codes or using them. We have used them in this blog to link to a tourism mobile android app as well as a few other things. The aim of this blog post is to educate you on how to use QR codes properly.
In short, a QR code is a two-dimensional barcode that enables text to be stored inside them. They are fast and reliable. Often times a url is stored in them that opens a web page on a mobile device like a phone.
There are a few guidelines to follow in using QR codes.
Mobile Ready
If want a QR to open your site, ideally your site should be mobile ready. We have talk about Responsive Design and mobile sites before, if you want more information on that. Having a QR code that opens to a page that looks awful on a mobile device is really of little benefit.
Make sure mobile phones are present and working
May sound obvious, since people always have their phones, but I have scanned QR codes where I had no signal to get the link. This is something to keep in mind when QR codes may end up in steel buildings or other places with little signal. Also make sure that the image is able to be scanned. One time at an event, I was trying to scan a QR code on the back of somebody’s t-shirt. The QR code was huge and wrapped around the side of the person’s torso a bit. That wrapping around was enough that I could not scan the code.
Picture is worth a thousand words.
The above code opens a mobile optimised property listing. Pretty slick.
The above image is the cover of the Northwoods Sporting Journal for this month. The QR code is in the lower left. Loads a non-mobile optimised subscription form that is very difficult to use on a phone. Not par for the course here.
The above image is an ad from a paper magazine. The QR code is the upper right. When scanned it plays a video that is a continuation of the ad with more information. Well done here.
We’ve shown that having a content management system for your site is important. But there are a number of content management systems available for use on sites. Web development companies usually pick one or two they like best; they might develop their own (for example, we built a CMS called datAvenger at Sephone), or they may choose to use an open-source CMS to power the sites they make.
But what should you compare if you’re looking at a few CMS options? Here are five questions to ask.
If you make a lot of changes to your site (or even if you don’t), the most important piece of the CMS puzzle is feeling comfortable with the area where you edit your site. If it’s a hassle or burden to find the page you want to change, wrangle with an editor, and then stumble to push the page to the live site, you’ll find yourself frustrated – fast.
If, on the other hand, editing makes sense and is easy to do, you can have an up-to-date site that changes whenever you like. There’s no reason why a simple content change on your site should take more than a few minutes. Don’t compromise on a CMS that makes you do more work.
It’s important that people can find your site on the web. Search engine optimization (or SEO) isn’t all about the content on your site; it’s also about how your site itself is built. A good CMS can help your site shine on search engines.
A good first check is to see how the page addresses (known as URLs) look for your site. Many older content management systems use a combination of codes and ID numbers in the URLs for every page:
http://www.example.com/index.php?pageId=25§ion=5
http://www.example.com/directory.php?dirId=25&person=52&view=standard
These kinds of URLs are tough for search engines to understand because they don’t say anything about what’s on the actual page. Look for a CMS that builds URLs using the title of the page, or another set of keywords you can customize:
http://www.example.com/about-us
http://www.example.com/directory/person/jim-smith
These make it easier for both search engines and your visitors to remember your site.
Bonus tip: Ask how a site’s CMS handles mistyped or broken links. In the tech world, we call these 404s. Ideally a CMS should show a screen that tells your visitor that the page is not available. It should also send a special server status code (a 404) so that search engines and other sites can tell that the page doesn’t exist. This helps search engines remove a page from their results after you delete it from your site.
As we mentioned in our “What is a CMS?” post, most content management systems allow you to edit text in a rich text editor. This allows you to style text, add links and images, and more. Chances are, though, that your site isn’t only text. What if you want to add a form for visitors to fill out, an image gallery, or a widget from another site? Make sure that the CMS you choose can support the kinds of content you need (or can be customized to adapt to what your site needs to do).
The administration area for some content management systems allows you to see how the changes you make will look on your site before you publish them to your live site. This is a great feature if you’d like to be able to tweak what you write before the world can see it.
Bonus tip: See if your CMS saves drafts as you work. If your browser or computer crashes, you don’t want to lose all of your changes!
Facebook and Twitter make it super simple to share links. Will the pages you share look their best, though? Facebook, for example, lets pages choose what they want for a description and image of a page when it’s shared. Check to see if your CMS can control how this looks instead of posting just the first few words from the page (or just the page title with no text at all).
These five questions are a good starting point when you start to compare your CMS options. If you’d like to know more about how content management systems can help your site, read more on our blog or get in touch with us!
In the next coming weeks and months, many of Sephone’s servers are moving. We are moving servers to Rackspace cloud hosting. This means that your site and email will be down for 20 minutes or so between now and April. As much as possible, we are going to try to do this at night time.
Please contact us with any questions, and thank you so much for being a Sephone customer.
We're Sephone, a Maine-based web development company. We offer tools and services to help your business run better.
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