“Secret” Website Tools v.2
more Secret Website Tools I Use:
I’m not a big fan of those off-the-shelf, whole-site Content Management Systems (CMS) as a rule. Don’t get me wrong - I like the convenience they can offer, and for managing large Corporate sites I think a really good CMS is probably one of the most important tools to have.
While there certainly are a lot of big websites out there, there are even more small to medium sized websites. In my experience, installing and managing big site-wide CMS applications with all those seemingly ‘necessary’ features on smaller websites is often simply overkill - adding complexity to a website instead of advantages. And the more complicated it is to use, the easier it is to break - this we know.
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My “secret” is a Handy little website content Spot Editing tool that makes quick work of updating websites and pages that have one (or more) areas of frequently updated content - perhaps a special Featured Product box, or an Announcements area, or… as discussed below, even a tidy little Content Management System (CMS). This Website’s Secret tool is appropriately called:
Handy Spot Editor
Like most websites - at IntuitivebyDesign.com there are several areas that are shared by each web page - the Header, the Footer, the Left Navigation Column and the Right side Features column.
Handy Spot Editor is designed to edit a single area on a webpage, but for this site I wanted a quick and easy solution to edit 2 areas that are shared site-wide - the left and right columns.
Instead of editing each individual web page in the site every time the content in these areas needs to be updated, I use Handy Spot Editor and set-up a simple little CMS.
How? I installed 2 copies of HSE - renaming one of them to differentiate between the two. Here’s a couple of screenshots of the Left and Right columns Spot Editing panels:
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- Use HSE to edit website menus
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- Use HSE to update website feature content
Seems to work just fine. In these sample source code snippets you’ll see that each column div contains code which calls the appropriate HandySpotEditor file -
Left side column:
<div id=”left”>
<script
type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://intuitivebydesign.com/folder/folder/HSEditorname.cgi?JS”>
</script>
</div><!–left–>
Right side column:
<div id=”right”>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://intuitivebydesign.com/folder/folder/HSEditornameRight.cgi?JS”></script>
</div><!–right–>
Whenever I need to update the content in either column on the website, I just log in to the appropriate Handy Spot Editor installation, make my changes, and poof - all the pages in the website are updated, automagically.
Exactly what I wanted - no more, no less, a just right website solution.
Try Handy Spot Editor out for yourself with this Demo.
If it looks like it might be a just right solution for your website editing tasks - Handy Spot Editor is exclusively available at Website’s Secret.
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