RSS Resources
Tanzarine Technology Ltd, working with long standing business partner Andor Information Technology Ltd, has recently delivered a managed content solution for the web site of Ability Magazine, the Information and Communication Technology magazine about disability issues.
The magazine is run by the British Computer Society's Disability Specialist Group, and receives sponsorship from a variety of sources. The new web site initiative was funded directly by the DfES.
The Ability production team needed a site which would not only address the very accessibility issues they regularly campaign for, but would also allow for a quick and simple update of content. The print version of the magazine prints six times a year, so there was a requirement to include some of this content, as well as "web only" content, to create a site which changed frequently, and maintained interest and relevance for its audience.
Tanzarine was able to draw on considerable experience of developing systems for managing web content in order to provide such a solution. Editors can update content from a separate, private, web site, and where appropriate delay the publishing of new content until a future date.
The main site also includes automatic expiry of content, which is moved into an archive, allowing editors to define the lifetime of an item of content when the content is entered, and not have to return to it at a later date to manually activate or expire it.
The site includes a standard search facility, available from all pages on the site, which provides a basic keyword search of both current and archived items.
All of the content for the site is held in a separate data store, whilst HTML templates and markup rules are used to display content when retrieved from the store. In addition, content is arranged into categories, and the site navigation is generated automatically based on categories currently in existence, and within a category, index pages are generated linking to all active pages within the category. This means that new pages added to the site do not need to be linked in manually.
All of this means that general aspects of the web site can be changed once and yet affect all content on the site with immediate effect, so changes to presentation which could potentially take hours on a traditional static web site can normally be set up with just a few minutes of work.
Another important aspect for the site was a design for accessibility, and so the site has few images, no HTML tables, and makes use of headings and subheadings to convey key points. Although a stylesheet is used to provide colour and font control, the site is still entirely functional if this style sheet is switched off.
