Content Management is a fantastic tool for adding menu items, news, and other content to your website.  But is it always helpful?

One problem with coming to content management from the traditional perpective of word processing and desktop publishing tools is that not everything translates.

There are some great tools for entering WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type text into browser-based content management tools - FCK being the most prominent and most advanced (http://www.fckeditor.net/).  However, HTML is not the same as the print formatting you get in word processing and desktop publishing tools, so users can get frustrated with even simple things like spacing and bullet points.

The ideal way to manage website content is to keep it very simple - and if items do need formatting in a particular way, or you need tables or unusual diagrams to be inserted - then use a web designer/developer to build a web page for you.  They'll know how it's going to look on different web browsers, and how to keep it standardised and in keeping with the rest of the website.

What is Web 2.0?

The answer, if you look at wikipedia, is mostly about the increased function you see in this generation of websites (i.e. websites in the 2000's) - particularly functions to do with collaboration.

Many of our customers, however, see design as an integral part of web 2.0, citing the bbc's new look and feel (http://www.bbc.co.uk)

Web 2.0 for them means shading, rounded corners, and panels which slide up and down.

What does Web 2.0 mean to you?

Splash screens are those web pages you sometimes get where you don't have any menu, just an image saying 'click here', or sometimes an animation.

MDs often like them because they look good, and let's face it, they do look good.

However, there's a difference between looking good and working.  If you imagine a beautiful yellow pages entry that doesn't give any contact details for your business you can see what I mean.

Splash screens turn people off, and provide another barrier between your potential customer and you.  Give them the info already!

Shop around

This applies to every type of business transaction, of course, but particularly when you've never ever commissioned a website, you need to talk to a number of suppliers about what they can offer you now and long term, and what it means in terms of helping your business to succeed. And most importantly you need to choose a supplier you think you can work with in the future. Working websites need attention.

Imitate

“There's nothing new under the sun” said the philosopher, and this is your excuse for copying the fantastic-looking website you saw last month. As long as it's not your nearest competitor's site, there's much to be said for borrowing large chunks of design brilliance from another site. Be as explicit as you can be for your website designer (“I want that header, with this picture”) – that will save them work, which means you get more of their goodwill.

Get a Content Management system

Many website buyers fall into one of two traps:

• They have to pay a designer each time they need to make a change, or:
• They have to understand complicated protocols for uploading new files to the website.

You really need a simple system for uploading content that's not going to break your website. This is generally known as a “Content Management System”. Ask your web developer how it works and get a demo before you commit to anything.

Photographs

This is where knowing a bit of technology will come in handy. If you can crop and resize pictures for use on the website, you will save a large amount of to-ing and fro-ing between you and the web designer once the site is up and running and you need to upload new content. Pick a package, learn the basics, and you can't go wrong. Here are some obvious ones:

• Paint Shop Pro
• Fireworks
• Photoshop Elements
• XNView
• GIMP

Copywriting

Keep the copy as simple as possible, especially on the home page. Remember that the home page is a conduit to other parts of the site, where people will be doing business with you. If they want the company history, they can find that under “about us”. Above all, get the copy checked by someone you can trust, and listen to their advice.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and is a way of formatting text to display nicely in a browser - the HTML

<strong>one</strong>two

displays in a browser as:

onetwo

HTTP - Hypertext Transport Protocol - is the medium in which HTML is transmitted across the internet.  It's a stream of characters that pass in between the web server and your browser - mostly HTML, but including a few headers.  Headers can carry information such as the type of response being provided (e.g. 404 for page doesn't exist) and cookies (small nuggets of information that the web server requests your browser to store).

If you're thinking of writing your first web page, forget Dreamweaver and start with Notepad (or Textedit if you're a mac user).

Why?  Dreamweaver's very good as an intermediate tool for web designers who want to create HTML documents (web pages) but it makes it too easy for beginners and isn't the best tool for serious web developers.

Beginners, rather than mess with a rich text (or WYSIWYG) interface, you need to understand the basics of HTML, play around, apply them, and see what happens.  Nothing's better than notepad for this.  There are some excellent web tutorials out there - try http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/

When you start developing web sites (as opposed to HTML documents, which may be used as part of a site) you'll need to give the computer instructions on how to produce HTML, usually by merging a series of hand-crafted templates with information from a database.  Then you'll need to use a programming language - typically PHP, C# or Java, and you'll typically use a tool specifically written for that language (such as Zend for PHP or Visual Studio for C#).

Hosting companies provide the disk space to store your website and expose it to the outside world.  Normally, hosting companies will also register your domain name for you.

Hosting can be fast and reliable when your website is on good hardware, and not sharing with too many other websites.  Hosting companies don't normally publish all this information, but price is a good guide to what you're getting.

For the complete beginner, I recommend supanames and namesco, whose low-end packages start at under £50/year.

When you start needing some serious reliability, look at dedicated servers from memset.  Here though you're paying upwards of £100/month.

Hosting companies tend to automate their customer service function.  If you'd prefer to deal with a human, it's worth asking your web developer to organise and manage your website hosting for you.