Workbench
Workbench is a Content Management System we’ve developed and have been using for several years now. It’s developed using Microsoft technologies (classic ASP, MSSQL), and solves solutions to many problems that we’ve seen our clients face.
- Easy to use and maintain
- Very customisable in terms of design and layout
- All content is file based, so it’s very straightforward to move content around. It’s relatively fast and easy to deploy
- It doesn’t require special software or frameworks to be installed- runs on a standard Windows server
- Able to run multiple country sites eg: Huggies Australia and New Zealand
Easy to use and understand
Click on the screen shots to see a larger version
Flexible content elements
A page template can be customized to have one main block of content, or many smaller chunks- depending on design and publishing requirements. These might be local content- so only appearing on this particular page. They might be section content, appearing only in the current section. Or they might be global- available to all pages.
Create a flexible content authoring UI
Developers can add various UI elements to a template. A common example of this would be a dropdown list of layout choices for this page – say show or hide a menu. Another might be whether to show or hide this content to visitors from a particular country.
Inbuilt help
As a developer is creating a template, they can include notes about what particular elements and templates do. A content author can then roll over elements to get inline help. This makes the authoring process much easier.
Web standards and accessibility
Workbench helps the content editor to create pages that meet standards and accessibility guidelines more easily.
- XHMTL formatting of content- as content is saved, workbench scans it and converts common mistakes such as br to br/
- accessible images- as soon as an image is added to content, the user is asked for the ALT tag, as well as a longdesc if appropriate
- in page validation- a user can quickly and easily test a page by clicking the validate button in each content edit window.
Clean, easy to understand URLs
Workbench URLs appear like:
rather than
This makes the page easier for search engines to index. It also gives the page a higher ranking- the absence of a suffix (the bit after “page”) means search engines such as Google assume that it is an important page in that section. Usability studies have also shown that users find this easier, since the URL visualizes the site structure. Since they can use the URL both as an indicator (where they are in a site) as well as a navigation tool (they can delete/change sections to navigate up or across your site).
Track what gets done by whom when
Workbench keeps a detailed change log that tracks changes to content and templates.