Intuitive InSite

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 here, 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:

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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