If you’re going to have a content-driven site, you need a way to manage content.
That’s going to mean a CMS of some kind, and an editor or two to do the content-management stuff.
I’ve been building CMSs in some form or another for the best part of my career, so I’ve naturally ended up with a few opinions on how to make them, and how to make them good.
From a twelve course meal to tapas
For the past couple of months I’ve been attempting to finish a blog post about good user experience for content editors.
As I’d sketched it out it was a simple list of dos and don’ts, but, as I wrote, the list became ever more detailed, and the post stubbornly refused to progress from draft to published.
So, instead of a mammoth, twelve-course-meal post which takes too long to ever see the light of day, I’m going to break it up into a number of tasty digestible tips, just like a lovely set of tapas.
Hey, it’s my blog, right?
Waiter, where's the tapas menu?
Ok, ok - here are my tips, that I find make life that little bit easier and understandable for CMS editors, and hopefully leads to better websites all round.
- Favour consistency over novelty
- Verbose in the code, simple in the UI
- Make everything editable
- The intern test
- Don’t show invalid options
I’ll update the list as I publish new tips.
Note: whilst I generally build Wagtail (and occasionally Wordpress) back-ends, these tips are meant to be applicable to any modern CMS.