I’m sure you spend a lot of time making sure your website’s user exper­i­ence is up to scratch. But are you think­ing about all of your users? What about the poor sap who has to use the content manage­ment system (CMS) that drives it all? Are you making life easier for them?

I’ve come to the conclu­sion that a lot of default CMS install­a­tions are just plain horrible to use. They’re over-complicated, diffi­cult and ugly. After the initial Oooh, I’ve got a shiny new toy to play with! feeling has worn off, you (and your users) just don’t want to use them. If the user doesn’t want to update the website, the website simply won’t get updated.

So what’s the answer? You can either find yourself a new CMS and rebuild the website around that, or you can make the best of what you’ve got.

Now, it’s likely that your CMS users won’t know HTML and nor will they want to. To help them out, the CMS often comes with a WYSIWYG HTML editor that tries to look, feel and work like Microsoft Word.

That’s all well and good, but they often come with absolutely everything enabled. Imagine Word with all of it’s toolbars switched on — it’s got buttons that’ll do the washing up, summon a small army and invade New Zealand or even change the colour of your text. It all adds up to make an editor that’s hard to use and intim­id­at­ing to the new user. Besides, do you actually want the user to be able to change the text colour? Won’t that contra­vene your brand guidelines or ruin your lovely design?

Keep it simple, stupid

Now for a tangent: A lot of people love Apple products. Why? One reson is their simplicity:

The most funda­mental thing about Apple … is that they’re just as smart about what they don’t do. Great products can be made more beauti­ful by omitting things.

(from technologyreview.com).

It’s that good old maxim again: Keep it simple, stupid. So what happens if we apply that to our HTML editor?

I started by remov­ing absolutely all of the buttons and drop-downs. Every last one. I was left with a blank canvas on which to type. Obviously this is a bit limit­ing, so I slowly added back the functions I needed to do the job (and nothing more). The end result is vastly simpli­fied; an envir­on­ment that lets you focus on the content, not the features of the editor. What’s more, by strip­ping out some of the more advanced features, I reduced the likeli­hood of the editor going bananas and crank­ing out the sort of HTML that Word itself would be proud of *.

Now, this is obviously just one small aspect of the CMS. But apply that principle across the whole system and the end result will be simpler, easier to use and less intimidating.

Don’t stop there either. If you’re able to custom­ise the look and feel of the inter­face, make it look good, too. Here’s that article again:

Attractive things work better… When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.

(also from technologyreview.com).

If you get the inter­face right, it makes life easier for your users and they’ll love you for that (or at the very least, harbour less of a desire to kill you).

* Not sure what I mean? Open a document in Word, then visit File > Save as Web Page. Open the result up in your text editor of choice and — as Mr. T would say — Let me intro­duce you to my friend pain!

I’ve been evalu­at­ing some content-management systems recently. We’ve got a few require­ments that rule out a lot of them straight off: It’s got to be a .net system, be able to run over SSL and be very secure, have decent version­ing, document manage­ment, audit trails and so on. There aren’t many products out there quite fit our needs.

We’re currently working with one (I’m not going to name names here) which has a document manage­ment compon­ent that looks something like this:

It’s a simple tree-view that works very simil­arly to Windows Explorer. Believe it or not, to build that simple box they’ve used twelve nested tables, a div, a span, endless inline styles, javas­cript: URIs and even a made-up HTML attrib­ute (view the full horror). Even if you don’t know HTML, you can see that it’s overkill. Apart from one on the outer-most element, it’s lacking any useful IDs or class-names for me to hook into with my style-sheet.

I know I’m a mark-up purist, but really that’s just taking the piss. Accessibility? Search-engine friend­li­ness? Page load-time optim­isa­tion? Nope, never heard of them. It’s alright though, it does AJAX.

It’s no wonder that so many corpor­ate web-sites have appalling mark-up when this is the state of the default output from the “enter­prise level” CMS products that drive them. If web stand­ards and best practise are going to go truly mainstream, we’re going to have to reach out to the developers of these products and nudge them in the right direction.

I’ll leave you with this exerpt from Bruce Lawson & Patrick Lauke’s talk at the multipack’s Geek in the Park event:

Legal & General… made their site access­ible because they were worried about the legal risk.

And they found as side effects: 30% increase in natural search engine traffic, a signi­fic­ant improve­ment in Google rankings for all their target keywords, a 75% reduc­tion in time for pages to load, access­ible to mobile devices, their time to manage content reduced from an average of five days to half a day per job, they saved £200,000 a year on site mainten­ance, they got a 95% increase in visit­ors getting a life insur­ance quote (which was the purpose of that site), a 90% increase in sales online, and 100% return on invest­ment in 12 months. And that was the side effects of making the site accessible.