musings

The standard way of delivering a website is to design and upload what the client wants. When amendments are required, the customer tells the web designer, who makes the changes and uploads them once more.

Alternatively, there are a number of full-blown Content Management Systems (CMS) which enable the designer to provide the client with a set of pages which are fully and directly editable in a web browser.

I have used both approaches, but recently I have begun to experiment with a hybrid solution which is basically a static website, with a few editable sections under the client’s direct control. This has several benefits. Firstly, I can retain the look and feel of the original design. Secondly, nobody has to learn a complicated set of procedures in order to create and use it.

This ‘home grown’ system makes use of IFrames or inline frames. These make it possible to embed content from another file anywhere on your web page. So you put an IFrame where you want on a page, and reference a document which the client maintains on her computer. You can turn off borders and scrolling, so the website visitor won’t be aware that part of the page is in fact in an IFrame.

To make it easy for the client, there has to be a fairly intuitive way of uploading the amended document each time a change is made. You don’t want to have to explain all about FTP, for example. Here’s a way to achieve that, using ordinary Microsoft Word.

In Word, when you go to File > Open you see a ‘Look in’ dropdown window. Most of the time you might use that just to navigate around the folders on your computer’s hard disk, or perhaps on a Local Area Network. However, if you scroll down to the bottom of the list, you will see ‘FTP Locations’. Here’s where you can define the location of a web server where your client can keep a .htm document created and saved in Word. Put in a few login details, and you instantly connect to the remote location.

Once the Location has been set up, and the document (like an ordinary .doc but with the .htm extension instead) has been created, your client can easily open, amend and save it as required. The changes are instantly seen on the web page containing the IFrame which references the .htm document.

Handy for price lists, news flashes and anything else which needs to be easily and frequently changed by someone who doesn’t want to learn a new application but is already familiar with Word.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.