If you happen to be a Yahoo customer who is trying to use Sitebuilder, there are some important issues to remember.

1) Make your page titles unique, even if it means you use “site name: page name”. Having all the pages titled “site name” is confusing and deprives search engines of important information.

2) Remember to put in both a description meta and a keywords meta. Some search engines use keywords, but Google doesn’t.

3) Make your keywords specific to the page. It’s ok to include a couple of the general site keywords, but if you are editing a photo page, include keywords that help define the content of the page; mountain photos, lake photos, kitten snapshots, candid photos, wedding photos, whatever is on that page.

You may be using a template, but you need to take care of the meta details.

To read more, jump to the drupal posts.
http://www.jbelldesigns.com/drupal/?q=node/9

Although CMS offer their users the advantage of web based editing interfaces, it turns out they also have drawbacks. The average open-source CMS has multiple editors and contributors, each intent on developing their own section of the code. While this results in robust development and testing, it also results in a constant state of churn as new features are added, old bugs eliminated, and the core code changes.

If the user has their Word Press, or Joomla, Drupal or Blogger hosted in their own site, they had better hope that the ISP offers Fantastico, or some other ISP wide way to update the CMS. Otherwise, they will need to keep their code updated by downloading new versions as they are posted, and migrating the old posts.

For some minor version updates, updates aren’t usually a problem, but when the new version of the code rearranges entire modules, changes the location of various functions, renames folders, and eliminates other sections, it can cause both loss of content, and css problems.

If you are looking for ease of administration, be aware that CMS either require an environment that eases the burden of code updates, or requires that the site owner have the ability to recognize and deal with the version changes.

One of the difficulties in developing websites is that many clients focus on the look and feel of their site without actually having any concrete ideas about what they intend to do for their content. It’s as though they are stuck in a “field of dreams” movie, where they assume that if the pages are built, the content will magically appear.

They have problems getting beyond the basic statement that they want to offer some service or product, and they have an email address. Sometimes it is possible to coax them into thinking about the cloud of “who, what, where, when, why” that creates the content of a site. But sometimes they plead that they don’t have the time, or that they don’t want to put specifics on their pages because they need to talk with prospective clients.

It’s not always easy to know what this represents. Sometimes they simply don’t know what they want to say beyond “trust me and buy this”. Sometimes it’s a problem with organizational skills, or with language skills. Sometimes it is a basic lack of understand about what makes their pages worth retrieving.
see essay on Worthwhile Content, (in an older blogger format)

In a case where the pages are formatted, but promised content never arrives, an installation of Word-Press can help the web designer by giving them a way to place the onus of content development on the client. Giving client access to the word press editor means that the designer can set up the design of basic pages, but the client has the opportunity to edit those pages content at their own pace.

In a sense it is a cop-out. Many people will not have the skills to use even the simple word-press interface, much less drupal or joomla. An even greater number of educated people can’t write well enough to describe their dreams. But if you have coaxed them to produce basic text, offered them pre-constructed paragraphs to edit, shown them outlines of possible ways to approach their topic, and they still balk, sometimes all you can do is give them access to their pages and offer to help them with editing the text when they have it.

The initial Wordpress installs were basic, but clean and simple to use. They were an open source alternative to “open” systems that had opted to start charging fairly steep prices for the convenience of on-line blogs.

Since then, there have been many, many revisions. Even so, most of the revised code retained the backwards compatibility, the clean menus, the ease of installation, and the overall ease of use of the original.

Themes became easier, WYSIWYG editing improved, plug-ins added capabilities, and there was a sense that the system would actually work for novice users. You could install it for a client with the assurance that Word Press itself would not violate the trust that you put in its core values.

However, starting in late 2007- early 2008, they changed some of the core. They rearranged the file structures, reformatted menus (not once, but twice), disrupted backwards compatibility, and broke many of the old plug-ins and themes. The new installation process didn’t provide a simple way to repair old installations, the upload tool had difficulty in some browsers.

Even when old installations were updated and the “new” update system and upload tool were disabled, so former versions that had worked could be used, the sweeping changes in the interface were daunting to the clients who had signed on for the original tool.

Undoubtedly there were valid reasons that the file structure was changed. And without a doubt there have been improvements and extensions of the capabilities offered to users.
However, the appeal of the tool was its clean ease of use, and the feeling that whatever changes were made, the creators of Word Press would take care of the people who used it. They would value the intuitive clean interface, and make sure that updates to the code were painless and transparent to end users.

In any case, those clients who have had it installed are frustrated by the changes, which have become so complicated that they can no longer count on being able to update their site themselves.

I expect any day to hear that Word Press is no longer open source, that they are charging for it, or that they are monetizing it by licensing it to turn-key web sites who offer the public crippled versions of Word Press limited to cookie cutter theme and color choices. When that happens, the “clean, easy and reliable” niche that once belonged to Word Press may have an opening for some tool which honors the original concepts that made Word Press so attractive.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même

This is an example of Word Press, installed to function as a blog / with a plug-in that give it some of the functions of a content management system.

Word Press is only one of a large range of available systems, but whereas Moveable Type charges for multiple user installations, Word Press is open source and free to down-load. The developers request a donation, but trust that if you are using for any significant benefit, you will recognize that their efforts make it possible for free.

It arrives with three alternative “themes”, but multiple skins and plug-ins available, making it very versatile. There are some limitations. As of yet, it doesn’t seem to ship with an automatic “excerpt” function, the type of code that pulls in a few words from recent posts. There are some separate plug-in downloads available that say they do the job, but I’ve also read some bug reports that seem to indicate it might be better to use the built in copy and paste for excerpts.