Introduction
To
WebEdit
Willamette University
Web Development Team
The Agenda
• The Past, Present and Future of WebEdit
• What is WebEdit and content
management?
• Hands on “Introduction to WebEdit”
Past: Before WebEdit
Two Years Ago
Before WebEdit
• Inconsistent designs
• Hard to support and maintain.
• Some pages had not been updated in years.
What have we done?
• Launched WebEdit in Spring Break of 2008.
• Imported the CLA and Admin department sites, Law
School and SOE sites, Support, Alumni, Parents, and
many other sites into WebEdit.
• Begun to utilize the full power of WebEdit.
• Begun to unify the design of all the sites.
Present: Moving to WebEdit
What are we doing now?
Building Airplanes in the Sky
Future: Full use of WebEdit
What does the future look like?
• All sites and pages imported from the old system into
WebEdit.
• Utilizing the functionality of WebEdit to make updating
content even easier.
• Continued site design improvements and unification.
• More tools in WebEdit: form builder, photo gallery,
events/schedules, etc.
Our Goals
•
•
•
•
More uniform navigation throughout the site.
Common header and footer throughout the site.
Some unification of the design of individual sites.
Structured content forms for easy updating and
automatic styling.
What is WebEdit?
• WebEdit is a content management system (CMS), which
is an enterprise, automated system, used to manage the
content of a web site.
– Allows non-technical content managers or authors to manage
the creation, modification, and removal of content from a web
site.
– Separates the process of design development from the process
of content development and then merges the content into the
design to create the published web page.
• WebEdit is your access to updating your department’s
content on the web!
Why A CMS?
• Provides advantages to:
– website manager
– content contributors
– website visitors
Advantages to Website Managers/Content
Contributors
• Ability to update the site:
– without any technical knowledge
– in real time
– from any computer with Internet
• Ability to enforce common look and feel, standards, style guides
• Easy to delete content, add content, verify content
– Find and delete redundancy
– Correct broken links
– Set review and archive dates
• Easily archive content
• Delete out-of-date or inaccurate content
• Create content once, use many places.
Advantages to Your Website
Visitors
•
•
•
•
More accurate content
More timely content
More consistency
Less duplication and redundancy
WebEdit Lingo
• Assets
• Templates
• Page Regions
• Blocks
• Publishing
WebEdit Lingo
• Asset—Any entity within the CMS that can
be used to generate content.
• Templates—The basic format for a page’s
layout. The template defines where each
page region is located on the page.
WebEdit Lingo
• Page Region—A
portion of a page that
contains content.
• Blocks—Containers
that hold content.
Each page region is
usually associated
with a block of
content.
WebEdit Lingo
• Publishing—The process of assembling
content in the development environment
(WebEdit) and transferring complete
pages to the web server. The publishing
process can operate via manual user
action, or on a timed schedule.
What is Structured Authoring?
• Structured authoring— Some pages in WebEdit are created and
maintained using a structured content form. This simplifies the
maintenance of the page, and also increases the consistency for all
pages of this type.
• Example: CLA faculty bio pages
Important URLs
• webedit.willamette.edu—used to access
Webedit from on anywhere in the world.
• www.willamette.edu/dept/webdev/—used
to access documentation about WebEdit,
sign up for training Workshops.
Web Development
Your Lifelines When You Get Stuck
• webdev@willamette.edu
• WebEdit Helpline: x6864
• Brian Hoyt
• Laura Simmons
• Timothy Gilman
bhoyt@willamette.edu
x6517
lsimmons@willamette.edu
x6535
tgilman@willamatte.edu
x6853
Lets Get Started
webedit.willamette.edu