How To Make Your CMS Website Happy

My Top Ten Tips For Keeping Your Content Management System based website looking good and performing well both on the screen and in search engine results.

Almost all of the websites we develop these days include a content management system, the ‘CMS’ as we geeks call it, allows you the client to take control of your website and update the page content, post news items, add pictures, manage your online shop, send out newsletters etc etc whenever and wherever you want.

But with this great new found power comes a modicum of potential chaos!

This article is just a few hints and tips on security, SEO and presentation for your new content managed website. A bit of good housekeeping and following a few guidelines will keep your CMS based website looking good and performing well. Trust me, things can go wrong when people get carried away with their new found editing skills, take a look at this horror! By the way, if you looked at that website and you thought it was OK, please stop reading this immediately and move to another country where technology does not exist!

Rule Number 1 – Security

There are countless numbers of nutters out there that would love to hack your website and turn your beautiful new web pages into images of dancing demons, naked sailors or redirected links to porn and virus sites. The best way to protect yourself from this is to use a good secure password and never share your log in details. Your password should be made up of a mixture of lower and upper case characters as well as numbers and special characters such as £ or ? or $.

A scary number of people use just a name or a normal word for their password, there is software out there that will crack this password quicker than you can say ‘butter my bottom and call me a biscuit.’ An example of a good secure password would be something like £dfG7L0?2$5NjFc7.

Rule Number 2 – Security Again

Read rule number one again! And don’t forget to log out of your CMS when you have finished working in it. It is also good practice not to get your browser to remember log in names and passwords for your most visited sites, including your CMS. If someone else uses your computer they can access all of your secure sites, keep the buggers out, start with a good strong password.

Rule Number 3 – Have A Cup Of Tea

Website Design Isle of WightWhen you first have access to your CMS it can be like getting your legs back after years of them going missing, the temptation is to start running but I’d suggest you just relax, have a cup of tea, think about if you really need to change anything on your website and pre plan what you are going to change before you do it and most importantly think about what the changes you are planning are likely to do to the websites SEO score and overall usability. (I’ll go into this a bit more further down).

We provide free video tutorials and free one to one training for you to ensure you get the best out of your content management system so if you get stuck or need support just call or come round, don’t go rushing in and don’t be afraid to ask if you get stuck. The kettle is always on here, just pop round.

Rule Number 4 – Don’t Go Text Format Crazy

Your content managed website has various text formatting tools that you can use, these allow you to change the color of text, change font, make text bigger and smaller and change the alignment of text. These can be very effective if used correctly but try to avoid going text format crazy.

For example avoid typing long paragraphs or whole pages in BOLD ALL CAPITALS, THIS CAN BE VERY AWKWARD TO READ AND IS GENERALLY REGARDED AS AGGRESSIVE OR SHOUTING. If I sent you a text message saying ‘What are you doing’, you would regard it as a normal text message, but if I sent you a text message that said ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!!’, the message that this display style of text gives off is totally different. Bold capitals used in the right way can be very effective, for example ‘This week we have an AMAZING special offer’ is much more effective than the whole page being written in that style.

Avoid Center Aligned Text in Big Bright Colours
Its hard to read and it looks pretty messy on the page. Again there are times when it can be effective used in the right way, but generally speaking try to keep your pages neatly aligned to the left as it is the natural place for people to start reading, or justified so the sentences spread out across the page.

Try and be consistent with the way text is laid out on pages, ie titles in one particular format, sub titles all the same, links all the same etc, it will help to keep people on your site if your text formatting is not so crazy that it makes people sea sick.

Use of appropriate fonts is also very important, for example you would not see a funeral directors website written in a cartoon font, handwriting style fonts are difficult to read and remember not all fonts work on all browsers.

For the remainder of this article please visit http://www.iowgeekblog.co.uk/index.php/keeping-your-content-manged-website-happy/

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