[thelist] Resend: Comments on Dreamweaver Contribute - was gotta vent
Tara Cleveland
evolt at taracleveland.com
Wed May 12 13:55:07 CDT 2004
Ken Moore wrote:
>I am thinking about suggesting Contribute to several nonprofit
>organizations to supply content to their own sites. I would welcome
>comments from anyone who has used it and/or helped not-technical
>users to use it.
I have a couple of non-profit clients with sites using Contribute and
so far they have loved it. I've found it not too difficult to do
non-complicated dynamic stuff - basically I hide it all from the user
in includes. I've also done two of the sites using (for the most
part) a lot of CSS and CSS layouts. This can get quite tricky with
Contribute though. If you want any tips let me know and I'll send
them on.
One of the clients started with Dreamweaver and found the learning
curve too high, so I suggested Contribute and he's very happy with
it. In fact I'm doing a second site for him in Contribute.
I haven't had many problems with support - I've had more support
troubles using other CMS-type programs. I really like that I can
modify the Help tab XML files with specific instructions for my
clients - that helps with cutting down support calls.
I don't even use Dreamweaver btw. I just take the Dreamweaver "this
is the template" code and paste it into the right place in my BBEdit
text/html file. So if you aren't into Dreamweaver, don't let that
stop you from creating "Dreamweaver templates" to put into Contribute.
Now I just have to keep reminding the client (aka beating him over
the head) that "all purple bold text! all the time!" is probably not
a great design choice (he's a client but he's also my dad, so I'm
allowed to yell at him ;-). I have, however, learned a lesson from
that, and on my next Contribute project I hid virtually all the
styles from the client so that they can't mess about too much with
crazy text styles.
If you want to take a peek:
http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cleveland/
and
http://www.inproject.ca
Both of the sites are (so far) fairly small and uncomplicated. It's
great for small clients that may not be allowed to put up a
server-side CMS app (like the Professor's site) or that want
something that is simple and fairly configurable. I wouldn't hesitate
to use Contribute again in a similar situation.
Regards,
Tara
--
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Tara Cleveland
Web Design and Consulting
http://www.taracleveland.com
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