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I like to use analogies when talking to clients about aspects of their websites or Search Engine Optimization. A few of my more famous ones are Imagine I'm a copy repair man" or Imagine your site is like a pack of bubble gum with multiple wrappers". These references seem a bit obscure for the conversation of website design, but are in fact very relevant. For the focus of this conversation, we are once again going to abuse the poor old bubble gum method to explain how a CMS site is designed.
Before we get to the nuts and bolts of design, let me take just a moment to discuss search engine optimization (SEO). SEO should be considered before design ever begins if you are concerned about your search engine rankings. Your developer can cause you the equivalent of search engine ranking suicide simply by implementing your new design if they do not first take SEO into consideration. Hire a SEO company to perform an audit and work with your developer first rather than finding out the effects after the deed is done.
Let's start by defining the differences between "static" and "dynamic" website content. Static content is content which is not manageable by the site owner, and therefore seldom changes. Static content is programmed directly into the code and takes a coder to modify it (or at least a helper program such as Adobe Contribute). In fact, Contribute is intended to bridge that gap between static and dynamic content, but although useful, it doesn't quite make it. Dynamic content is content which is pulled by a server side CMS (Content Management System) from a database. In my area of use, typically it's pulled from a MySQL data structure. This data is readily changed by the site owner via the CMS interface, which regardless of which one you use, generally has the overall look and feel of Microsoft Word or Open Office.
Content Management Systems have been on the rise for many years. It's a bit ironic that developers such as myself initially created these applications to help control data in a faster manner. Speed equals more clients served in a lesser period of time. The side effect however was that once the sites were developed using a CMS, the site owners didn't need to rely on the developers as much anymore and thus paid less ongoing management fees. As a result, many of the developers literally coded themselves out of a job. But regardless of the user, there are still generally issues that must be addressed by a developer such as changes to the look and feel of a website.
This brings us to our bubble gum reference, and one of the hardest things for inquiring minds to understand about a CMS. When designing for a CMS delivery system, a designer has to plan for movement within the website that the user may perform. Movement items such as several articles, graphics, briefs, news snippets, et al. can have odd effects if not taken into consideration during the design phase. By adding content to a page, you are pushing the page itself down causing a scroll event on small monitors. The design must account for this movement by allowing the background to follow suit. Other examples of this in action may be adding banners or additional navigational items and modules. From a coding point of view, this is where the bubble gum wrapper effect comes into play. A CMS is designed to be modular. A few examples of this modular effect are the header, footer, content box, left pane and right pane. Surrounding all of this is your "wrapper" or general design.
So you can relate a bit when I say that a CMS is like a package of bubble gum. We have the overall wrapper (equivalent of the design), the wrappers surrounding each stick of gum (look and feel of that section..eg header/footer/content appearance) and finally the gum itself (the textual or graphical content provided by the site owner). These elements become important when generating a preview design for a client because most designers also include "lorem ipsum" or "dummy lipsum" which is simply classic Latin text. We include this dummy lipsum to indicate that this is filler text to show the appearance of the design element, rather than showing your literal content. This throws site owners off because they tend to want to make changes to that text rather than see it for its visual element.
So the next time you request a design from your local website company, this may help you to understand the makeup of a Content Management System and the elements which go into it. Design is simply a graphical representation of the look and feel of your site, and should not be confused with the content phase of your development which generally follows the design.
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