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content guidelines
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The easier your visitors can get around, the more enjoyable their experience will be and the more useful they will find your web site. Working with a designer to create an information architecture will help you organize your content in an intuitive manner for your visitors. Your web site information architecture corresponds to a sitemap and ensures there is a logical place in your site for all your information. This is a very important part of the web design process, please ensure you take the time to do it right.
If you are not sure how to begin the process of designing your web site, please contact us so that we can assist you in this critical phase.
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We recommend that when preparing your initial website content you organize your documents in files and folders based on the information architecture. This allows for efficient content entry and training. You can paste content from Microsoft Word directly into your ssCMS articles when editing, and can upload all common documents, images, and other content so if it is prepared ahead of time the population of your web site should not take a long time.
If you are working with a web designer, you may want them to enter the content for you or review it once it is in place to ensure the pages look their best. In general, this will not be required as ssCMS is designed to make content entry easy and convenient.
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ssCMS lets you place files on your website that visitors can download. This can be anything from printable coupons, on-line videos of your TV or radio ads, or your full product catalogs as a PDF.
Please ensure that file names only consist of alpha numeric characters; you should avoid using spaces, extended characters, etc. Correct example: "File_Name.jpg", incorrect example: "File Name #.jpg". The reason for this is that there are browsers that have trouble downloading files that have spaces or unusual characters in the file name.
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Images can be used to bring your articles to life. In order to ensure the images fit well within your website and display properly for everyone visiting you should follow some simple guidelines:
- On most computer screens, images are limited to 72dpi. Even if your screen is capable of displaying 96dpi images, you will still want to make all photos and graphics at 72dpi (this is the default for many image programs so don't worry if you are not sure what all this means).
- Pixel size (e.g. 640 x 480 pixels) is the measure of how large your image will appear on various screens. In general, you should assume that your visitors are viewing your site at 800x600 resolution to make sure everyone can see the images you place in your articles. To assist in this, each site developed has slightly different width/height specifications to ensure images fit in content and are appropriately sized. These sizes will be provided during your training session and our article editor can help you make sure you are only using correctly sized images.
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There are two main formats for images on the world wide web. These are JPG and GIF. In some browsers, other formats such as BMP or PNG also work, but these are not standard and should not be used.
When making a choice as to what format to use, it's important to look at the content of the image. GIF excels at showing simple, flat areas of color. It also has a limitation of only being able to display up to 256 colors. This makes GIF files perfect for graphics such as logos, bar charts and other solid color elements. If you have access to a professional image application such as Photoshop, you can also create transparent GIFs so that the background color shows through the image.
JPG images are capable of displaying 32 bit color (millions of colors). JPG also offers exceptional compression qualities. It should be kept in mind that JPG compression is lossy, that is, when an image is compressed in JPG format it loses some of its quality. Each successive save of a JPG image further deteriorates the quality of the image. Therefore, it is best to keep a master image in another format such as PSD or TIF, especially if you intend to make numerous changes to it. The level of compression you choose for your image is dependent on several factors. First of all, how does the image respond to high levels of compression. If it maintains its integrity, then by all means, compress it as far as possible. Usually, a photo will start to visibly degrade at the 50% compression mark or slightly higher. While it is important to ensure that an image is not too compressed, file size must also be kept in mind. An image with little compression will take far too long to download. A good size to shoot for with a full color photograph is between 30-50 kb, depending on the size.
Keep in mind that, the more images you have on a page, the more they should be compressed. Images can also be made physically smaller to reduce their size.
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