Content Management System

Graphic Alliance’s Content Management System (CMS) enables non-technical people to create, publish and manage all types of content while keeping your brand consistent and uniform across the site. The core system is not only rich in useful features for non-technical users (e.g. marketing managers) but also contains advanced management tools for site administrators and IT staff.

Keep Visitors Happy

Websites need to provide fresh, up-to-date and relevant content if they are to meet the needs of their visitors. Graphic Alliance’s CMS helps users to update content whenever and wherever.

Easy (and Fun) to Use

Graphic Alliance’s designers created the CMS for two simple reasons. The first is practical: to provide a system for clients to use rather than battle. The second is purely selfish: to free our designers from the restrictions of other CMS solutions so that they can do the best for your brand on screen every time.

Search Engine Optimisation

Ranking highly in the search engines for relevant keywords and phrases is essential for every website. Graphic Alliance’s CMS has been designed to help search engines find website content easily. It features a range of simple features that optimise client content so that natural search engine rankings improve.

Graphic Alliance’s Content Management System (CMS) enables non-technical people to create, publish and manage all types of content while maintaining consistency of your brand across the site. The core system is not only rich in useful features for non-technical users (e.g. marketing managers) but also contains advanced management tools for site administrators and IT staff.

Graphic Alliance recognises that regularly updated page content will improve a website’s search engine rankings, which is why our designers and developers work together towards improving the experience of using the CMS and adding new tools to the framework.

Easy Page Updates

The CMS has been designed by designers and built by computer scientists. This means the user experience is comparable to a beautiful front-end website. The CMS controls all the page content found on client websites. Just double-click on the content that requires attention and you can add/change/remove content instantly.

Drag & Drop Function

All content can be rearranged on the page using revolutionary “drag and drop” functionality. For example, if an image on the page needs to be moved the user simply drags that image to its new location on the page. All the different ‘objects’ on the pages can be manipulated in this way including text, images, videos, downloads, feedback forms, RSS feeds, blogs and so on.

Little Training Required

Using the CMS is simple and requires very little training. The interface has been designed intuitively with a familiar Microsoft Word feel. Tutorials take no more than 45mins even for the most stubborn luddite!

Version History

All changes ever made to any page/section are recorded by the system, enabling users to rollback to a previous version immediately. This means that the emphasis of the entire site can be changed effortlessly (e.g. for promotions running over a limited time).

Preview and Publish

Any page content change is held within the CMS and only released to the public once the ‘publish’ command is issued. This means that whole sections may be prepared and approved before releasing to the live website. Not all changes are permitted by the CMS; the system will be very aware of any branding/design restrictions placed on the website pages and will not permit changes that fall outside of the approved design style. This ensures consistency of brand communication across the site.

Images and Video

The CMS automatically re-sizes, encodes and compresses images and video for the website. The system can handle the majority of digital image/video formats.

Site Structure

The site structure (which controls the main and sub-navigation) is also manipulated in a “drag and drop” fashion. Pages and entire website sections can be relocated by simply picking them up and dropping them into their new location. New pages are added in a similar way with the user dragging a “new page” icon to the appropriate area within the site structure.

Search Engine Principles

The CMS has been developed to enable Search Engine Optimisation. Once relevant keywords and phrases have been identified, users can input them in all the right places using the CMS. The “meta” data, such as description and keywords, can be controlled on a site-wide basis or micro-managed on a page-by-page basis. In addition, the physical location of each page is reflective of its position within the menu structure. All pages are automatically coded by the CMS to make the page information as accessible as possible to search engines.

RSS Feed Configuration

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for syndicating content across the internet. If you want your site to be able to allow other sites to publish some of your content - RSS is a technology that allows you to do so. Your customers and prospects will be able to subscribe to the feeds most relevant to them allowing you to keep them up to date and helping to draw them back into your site. If required, the CMS can be configured to create RSS feeds of updated content and pod-casts for other websites to use. The RSS content contains a small amount of the information from the main site with links to the appropriate website pages; it is primarily used to drive web traffic to the site and is considered good practice for search engine optimisation.

Localisation

Graphic Alliance’s CMS has grown into a truly global framework of tools used by the likes of Unilever across 12 markets and only pan-European political party Libertas in 20 languages across 27 different EU member-states. In simple terms, the technology enables ‘global’ content to be managed centrally and dispersed to any number of localised sites, in any language. In parallel to this, ‘local’ content can be managed and published at a local level, within a fully translated publishing environment.

Website Statistics

Google Analytics will be installed on every page of the website automatically, enabling free-at-the-point-of-access analysis and monitoring of website behaviour. The statistical information held here will often guide our future website recommendations.