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L.N. Revathy

So you've got your Web site up and running? Here are some tools to give you that edge in keeping your site current and creative.

PLANNING, creating and posting your site on the Web for all to see is no joke.

But assuming you manage to do this, there's the next challenge - adding/editing content on your site so it is useful and interesting to the surfer, in essence keeping its content up-to-date.

This will surely take me hours of sitting in front of the system everyday, you might say.

But take heart. Content Management Systems (CMS) now take the drudgery out of this task and help you update content on your site efficiently and creatively.

Take CityDesk, for instance. It is a tool that allows users, even beginners, to create a Web site. It aids those who know nothing about HTML or Web servers to manage the site by using a program that is as easy as a word processor.

Developed by the New York-based Fog Creek Software, CityDesk lets individual users publish sites that contain up to 50 files. The entire process — of formatting pages, creating home page, navigation, and publishing the site to a Web server — is automated.

Whether you're creating a city newspaper with hundreds of journalists, a fortnightly or monthly in-house newsletter, or even a personal weblog, CityDesk lets you add, edit and remove content. Until now, only large corporations could afford CMS, which ran on expensive servers. Small businesses, schools, and individuals were stuck with coding every page manually and transferring it to a Web server. But CityDesk, unlike other CMS that need to be installed on a Web server, is a Windows program that generates a site and transfers it to any Web server automatically. You only design the formatting of your site once. After that, with a single click, you can create new articles based on the same design.

The system facilitates different people updating the site simultaneously without any risk of conflict.

Joel Spolsky and the team at Fog Creek Software have created this system to manage sites with multiple languages, multiple audiences, and multiple editions. CityDesk's Windows word processor supports spell check, WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get), drag and drop, word count, and search and replace. However, you must have one copy of CityDesk for each individual user.

Say you want to publish a newsletter every week in two languages. CityDesk provides an interface for translators where they can see a list of untranslated articles and translate them on the spot in a split-screen environment.

Or suppose you produce a newsletter that has different regional editions. CityDesk keeps track of that and publishes the different editions in their entirety. The Joel on Software Web site, created exclusively with CityDesk, is available in over 26 languages, including `right to left' languages and a variety of Asian languages.

CityDesk is Unicode-capable, which allows you to create and publish sites in any language or script (supported by your computer).

From site updating, here's moving on to publishing on the Net.

This again is no laughing matter. Word processors and graphics applications allow one to manage text and images on a personal computer, but to make these available to the World Wide Web - a seemingly similar environment of documents and destinations - is a formidable task.

Ease of use vanishes behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in computer-based graphic design, and, what not, all of which call for the patience of a saint.

Dean Allen has developed Textpattern, a Web application designed to help overcome these and other hurdles to publishing online. This CMS is for all kinds of Web sites, even weblogs, and helps simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant Web pages.

There's also WordPress, a personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, Web standards, and usability. Matthew Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress.

Well, now that you have content management systems, want to get cracking at creativity? Get started...

lnr@thehindu.co.in

Picture by K.K. Mustafah

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