Website Collaboration

Editing Your Own Website

Website Collaboration One of the questions we are asked most often is whether we can design a site that permits you to add content, update images, maintain a calendar or photo gallery, or some other form of collaboration.
The answer is yes.

Depending on the type of site you want, and its structure, we can set up your pages so that you can directly edit elements on the pages, or edit them through a dedicated set of administration pages residing in the "back end" of your web site.

There are some limitations to the areas of a particular web page that you can edit depending on the type of design we use or the template we select. The limitations have to do with maintaining the integrity of the design, maintaining the compliance of the website to HTML standards, and/or maintaining an effective search engine promotion strategy. By and large, however, you can have control over the content areas of your web pages, even including the menus and banner images.

Collaboration

Larger organizations, or companies with different individuals responsible for different services or functions, may want to have a number of different people contribute to their web site. These types of contributions can come in many forms, and we can tailor your web site to match any needs.

Website Content

We can provide a website which permits you to directly or indirectly edit content. In addition to this, we can provide a system which allocates certain areas of the website to different individuals within your organization, limit the areas or types of content they can edit, provide auditing trails and backups of previous page versions, and provide editorial control or an approval process before content goes live. No matter what your workflow, Softnet can tailor a system to meet your exact needs.

Blogs

Many types of organizations can benefit from a blog (or blogs) which provide a quick and easy means for their principals or employees to convey information of interest to your potential clients and partners. Blogs are essentially an online diary of information, opinion, thoughts and other information related to your company’s business. A blog can be authored by a single individual, or can have multiple contributors. Business blogs are typically thematic in nature, covering topics of interest to your employees and customers. Blogs can also be set up to include and encourage visitor responses and comments.

Forums

A forum acts as an online resource for your customer to get answers to specific questions or issues. Forums are topical in nature, and users can post questions to your organization on issues related to the topic that the forum was set up to service. Your employees can then provide answers or responses to customers via the forum, so that both the question and answer become a permanent part of the forum's contents. In this way, a customer with a question about your product or service may find that their question has already been addressed in a previous posting - in other words, the forums are searchable, providing your visitors with a permanent record of specific questions along with their answers.

Support Sites

For larger organizations or organizations with products or services of a highly technical nature, a full support site may be called for. A support site is typically an add-on to your regular public website which is designed to permit your employees to directly interact with customers. Support sites often feature a ticketing system so that you are assured that your support personnel are addressing every customer interaction in a timely manner. Each customer question is assigned a serial number (a ticket), and that ticket is then tracked through the support process. Whether that ticket is passed from one department to another, responded to immediately, placed on hold while further information is garnered from the customer, or sent to a supervisor for disposition, you are able to track every single interaction with your support staff from start to finish, ensuring that your customers are getting the attention they deserve.

Methods Used

Content Management Systems

A Content Management System (CMS) provides a fully-featured front-end website which is controlled by a separate back-end website. Website owners or employees use the back-end site to set up pages, add or edit content, add features such as blogs, event calendars and so forth, all in an easy-to-understand question and answer format. Just decide what you want, fill in the blanks, and your work immediately and automatically appears on the public, or front-end, side of your web site. Content management systems can be flexible enough to deal with any site design or structure - this website, for instance, is built on our own CMS that we have created expressly for our customers.

Direct Editing

We can design pages which are compatible with Adobe Contribute, a website design tool which allows you to directly edit your online web page as easily as if you were using Microsoft Word. Your website becomes yours - you can add pages, add images and tables, set up hyperlinks, and have multiple people edit your website's content from any computer with an internet connection. By imposing small limits on the areas of the page that you can edit, your website's look and feel are not compromised and you and your employees maintain control over the content of your website.

Indirect Editing

In some instances, it may be necessary to provide you with a more indirect means of editing your site. This can be due to a number of factors, including the type of content to be edited and the design of the website. For instance, if we develop an e-commerce website for you, product pricing, descriptions, features and options would be contained in a database. To change your product's prices, for instance, we would provide you with a special set of administration web pages which would permit you to update your product pricing in the database, which in turn would be reflected on your website. The effects are just as immediate as the direct editing described above, but the method preserves the information we need to provide a shopping cart for your website.