Your Business is Doomed Without Good CMS Web Design
Well, not quite. But deciding what kind of content management system is right for your business can go a long way toward the success or failure of your business. The decision comes down to the answers to these questions: Is the flow of work in your business as productive as it could be? Can your current CM solution expand its capabilities to keep pace with your business as it grows? Consider the following to determine if your current CMS is working for you, or if a change might be in order.
Is your current content management system outdated? There is no question that outdated content management methods can often be more of a hindrance than an asset to productivity. Further, content management systems that cannot match the rate of expansion of the business quickly lead to outdated content, confusion amongst the team members and a lag in the workflow.
Is your system difficult to use? Symptoms of a user-unfriendly system landscape include inconsistent categorization, organization and publishing of content. All of these things can easily frustrate a user and slow down the workflow. That’s counterproductive, and if this is happening to your team, a new or revised CMS may be the answer.
Does your team struggle to produce simple, fast revisions to your content? By their very nature, updates like product information and press releases need to be accurate, timely and valuable. If your team isn’t able to keep pace with such updates to your content, investing in a new CMS may be a good idea. Publishing information will be sped up with the availability of tools that will allow subject matter experts to create, edit and publish their content on their own. Your business won’t be at the mercy of staff trained in HTML to update the content. With an effective CMS web design software package in place, anyone on staff will be able to create and edit their own content, making it easier to keep the content up-to-date and accurate.
Few things are more fracturing to a team effort than getting road blocked by missing information. It is difficult when you think you have found just what you are looking for only to end up in No Man’s Land. Ineffective CMS web design can cause gaps in and overlaps of information that can really slow down work. A CMS is meant to help with organization, not hinder. A CMS web design solution can ensure that your content is always accurate, thereby keeping the flow of work productive amongst the members of your team.
Successful CMS web design makes it easy for everyone on staff to manage content, regardless of whether they are computer savvy or not. An effective CMS solution can put even your non tech-savvy staff in the driver’s seat because they can create, modify and design content without needing any specialized technical knowledge. The interface should be intuitive. A good CMS helps each cog in the machine to work at optimal productivity. And that leads to increased productivity all around.
A well-designed CMS solution consolidates control of content from an organization-wide “home base,” thereby reducing the amount of information overlap, and can identify and assemble content automatically. That means that multiple people can be adding, deleting and editing content all at the same time. A good CMS web design solution will help your team be more collaborative and more productive all at once. That means less time wasted, which translates into more money in your company’s coffers.
If your business is suffering from any of these ailments, you need to re-evaluate your current strategy. Improvements in your CMS can drastically affect the way in which your staff reaches it goals. Through effective CMS web design, your staff can both work collaboratively and individually to get the job done.
In summary, the goals of CMS web design are to consolidate control of your content and make it easy for your staff, regardless of their level of technical computer knowledge, to create and publish their own content. If your information is outdated, difficult to navigate or subject to the isolated control of various sources, your CMS isn’t working as well as it could be. It’s time to make a change.
Chris Coleman is a Business Analyst at Capita Technologies. Capita Technologies provides CMS web design services for a wide variety of clients.
Getting An Understanding Between 2D And 3D Animation
Do you remember when computers first came out? It was truly a momentous occasion that will be hard to top. If you are old enough to remember the early days of computers, then you are probably pretty impressed with all of the technological advances that have been made within the industry. One of the biggest advances is in the form of animation; computer animation to be specific. The improvements made within a relatively short span of time are incredibly awesome.
Animation actually refers to any kind of animated graphic, not just the 3D animations. Animation has historically been produced in two ways. The first is by artists creating a succession of cartoon animations frames, which are then combined into a film. A second method is using physical models, such as in King Kong.
The model is positioned, the image is recorded, then the model is moved, the next image is recorded, and the process continues. At times a simple rendering machine is used to produce successive frames to create animations, where the image is slightly changed in each one. It is hard to believe that it all started as basic cartoon figures in a book and flipping the pages over.
All types of animations, including computer animation, depend heavily on motion control. Naturally, many of the earlier animators were actually scientists rather than artists and as such, scripting systems were developed and this resulted in the animator actually writing a program, or script to control the animation. Most of the earlier systems did not have the computer power needed for optimum results.
In the early days of animations cartoons, expert animators such as Walt Disney, would design (choreograph) an animation by drawing certain intermediate frames called keyframes. Then the other, less experienced animators would draw the in-between frames. The sequence of steps to produce a full design computer animation would include developing a story (or script), and laying it out on what is known as a storyboard.
This is a sequence of drawings showing the form, structure and story of the animation. Once a detailed layout of the action scenes is produced, it is correlated with a soundtrack. They would then transfer the frames to sheets of acetate film, called “cels”. The cels were then assembled into a sequence and filmed.
You have more than likely dealt with animations and may not have even known it. For example, if you have ever created a project using PowerPoint or a similar application, then you have created a project using 2D animations. Using the computer to create these animations is a much faster method than the original method of hand-painting cels.
Considering the fact that it is close to impossible to produce the thousands of drawings that would be needed for creating the animation by hand, the superiority of computer animation can be seen when creating 3D animation versus hand-drawn methods, as most people are pretty inefficient at drawing three-dimensional objects.
A whole world of information about computer animation eagerly awaits you from Mike Selvon portal. We appreciate your feedback at our computer animation design and production blog.
How RIAs Can Increase Your Website’s ROI
When properly conceived, architected, and executed – RIAs can engage your users, build your brand, and drive your technology ROI.
RIAs, or Rich Internet Applications, are applications which move traditional desktop functionality onto the web. A great example of this is Gmail, the Google email client which is entirely web-based. Instead of accessing a desktop client such as Outlook, you log into a web site and get a similar experience.
At the heart of an RIA is the user experience (UX). The traditional web paradigm was to present static pages of text with a series of links or buttons. Users would click on things and wait for a new page to load while their transaction was taking place somewhere behind a web server.
This paradigm still holds for web navigation, but for interaction with a single web application, page-loads are a no-go. Technologies like Ajax, Adobe Flex, and Microsoft Silverlight can build the user interface in the browser, handle user interactions, and allow for communication with the server without reloading the page.
Ideally, users will experience near instantaneous interaction (like with most desktop software). In fact research has shown that web users are growing less patient, and expect a greater perception of performance with the web sites they use.
If you are doing business on the web, it is in your best interest to evaluate how RIA technology can help you keep your competitive edge. Your customers will be expecting it.
With RIA technology properly applied your business can:
-Create a more engaging experience for your customers – building a larger and more active customer base
-Add stickiness to your site – keeping customers from going to your competition
-Build your brand – adding bankable value to your most important asset
-Use and re-use web services – getting a higher return on your technology investment
-Add new features to your web site – turning your site into larger profit center
This is not to say that you should try to build your own version of Gmail. A prudent way to begin is to look at the way your users interact (or want to interact) with your web site. Find ways to add that perception of instantaneous action. You can iteratively add functionality to your web site while keeping a sharp eye on usability.
Let’s say, for example, that you have an ecommerce web site where people can check their orders. They navigate to an orders page where they are shown a list of order numbers and dates that are hyperlinked to an order details page. What if clicking on that link dropped open a box underneath that order that contained the detail info? The user doesn’t have to navigate away, and can check each order from that one page. This is one small example of the interactivity and user experience that RIA technology can provide.
John Moore is a Web 2.0 expert who creates Rich Internet Applications. He has created the web’s first RIA community at http://www.riaspot.com