Major reworks of SME websites tend to be on a three to five year cycle. That's quite a long time to be presenting the same public face to your business, but fortunately there are ways around this. The basic principle is the separation of content from style.
The modern word processor has blurred the lines between content and style for most people.
The content is the text of your document and other external assets like images. Copy and paste a word processor document into Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit (though you have to convert to plain text in the latter) and you see pure content. The style, ie headings, colour, emboldening, italics, bullet points, numbered lists, text boxes, tables and so forth, have all gone.
But you don't want to lose all that when you go to the web, do you?
There is another way and it's coming (in practical terms) with Microsoft Word 12 which will use XML as its default file format1. This gives us the opportunity to be able to use a transform on your document to render it for the web. This brings us neatly to the next issue.
Within the HTML specification (the baseline language used for writing web pages), there is provision for six heading levels. These are used by search engines to attempt to gauge the relevance of different parts of your document relative to each other, so they are quite important.
Also included in the specification are provisions for boxes of blocks of text, images and so forth, bullet points, numbered lists, tables and paragraph text. That's not the end of the list, but that will do.
So if we can find a way of mapping your content produced in Word into a web page we're in business. This is where styles come in.
We can apply styles to each of the above mentioned boxes, lists, tables, etc. Rather than go into great detail as to how it's done, click on the Air, Fire, Water and Earth links below when you've finished reading this page. We haven't touched the words, but we have changed images, colours of headings and backgrounds within each motif and if you print it (go to Print Preview if you don't want to waste paper) you'll see that it's formatted to suit the printer, so superfluous navigation has been removed. This is all done with style sheets - there is no clever database-driven website technology in the background. If you use a database you can get even cleverer, but that's outside the scope of this paper.
We could have also moved the entire page around, but we decided that would have been too dramatic, if not actually confusing.
We can change your page with the seasons as we've done with the English Gardening School website, or we can refresh your website annually with a new look - but this does mean planning ahead.
It also means that it's easier to reuse your content in different ways eg for RSS feeds, newsletters and so forth.
You can jump between motifs using the playtime navigation on the left as well as here:
1To be more accurate it will be a compressed (Zip format) file which will contain the text content, images and probably the complete works of Humphrey Bogart if you so chose.
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