The WordPress CMS
We’ve used WordPress for many years now to manage news sections of websites, where its ‘pile ’em up’ approach to managing stories, and simple user interface has allowed many of our clients to take over day-to-day management of this section of their website. Over the last year or so, however, there have been significant improvements under the WordPress hood. Most recently we’ve seen the introduction of the graphical menu management system, which we think is a pretty strong contender for killer ap status amongst CMS systems…
The new menu manager lets the site administrator drag and drop new pages to where they are wanted in the site hierarchy. Further, you can change the way the link appears in the menu – retain or shorten the page title? add some hot text to hint to vistors? – can do!
The new TwentyTen templates also make good use of style sheet (CSS) properties to build fly-out menus that use no Javascript. This is quite a cool trick, and whilst it is getting more difficult to surf the web without Javascript, it is a safer way to travel, so we prefer to leave it out of essential services – like the menu!
Simple things to make for a more pleasant browsing experience!
A problem with fly-out menus is that they often leave you with no idea where you are in the site hierarchy. This can be a real pain if you surf into the middle of a large site using a link from elsewhere. The page looks interesting, but it lacks any context – where am I? Where do I go next? To avoid this on the new Lochaline Dive Centre website, we looked at adapting the TwentyTen menu code so that active sub menu’s are held open. Peace, I can arrive at any page in the site and see clearly where I am… Simple things to make for a more pleasant browsing experience!
Most CMS systems restrict your freedom to build sites, pushing you to do things their way, rather than giving you the freedom to build what you want. This results in a definite feel for the way they work – done well it need not be clunky, but still the underlying CMS imparts a flavour to your browsing experience… What is really impressive with the new WordPress system, however, is that you would need to check the web address window in your browser to realise that you are not in a custom built website. Indeed, there are very few changes to the Lochaline Dive Centre website due to its move to the CMS, what changes we have made were done because it is now so easy move pages within the site structure. This has given us the freedom to re-order content to try and put together a more user friendly site.
That is how it should be…
