[mike_m]

You know the story - set up a lovely site - implement a whizzy CMS with a wysiwyg page editor - train the client up - everything is hunky dory, then....

• they add a load of images to a page that are too big and resize them in the editor...

• they use a large font and make it bold instead of using the H3 setting in the text styles menu

• etc.

• etc.

So I'm putting together a crib sheet of do's and dont's, tips and hint's etc. for people using our cms - just wondering if anyone's done something similar so I can see what else these wacky clients are trying to do to ruin thier sites. or if anyone knows of good resources for this kind of info..

In an ideal world someone's already done this for client's who are using wysiwyg editors - not function specific stuff, but general web no-no's.. And then I can just nick it

otherwise I'll post up the guide when I've finished it.

Cheers people

[lucidcreations]

We don't have one, but we really should. I'd be interested in seeing the finished article.

Clients are fuckwits. I've just finished a small static site for a client. On the contact page they requested a link to Multimap using their postcode, the usual kind of thing.

Anyway I've just had an email back from the client with a list of amendments. Second to last "can you move the circle on Multimap please, its not over our building"......Last comment "When you upload these changes would you be so kind as to add the facility where by we can edit all text and images.". Yeah sure, would you be so kind as to deposit an extra £1k into our account please.

Sigh.

[Dusteh]

I'm beginning to wonder if CMS is really the way to go afterall... the point of paying a design company to build your site is that its 'designed' - adding giant red bold text as headers and uploading images of your cat to the news page undermines the whole look of the site and kills it stone dead.

Main problem I've encountered is clients moaning because they now have the function to put images on their webspace... but shock horror they don't have software know-how on resizing and optimising - you can't blame them for that, but what aggrovates me are the ones who then blame me because the image editing software isn't magically built into the website, or they expect full training for no extra charge.

A crib sheet would be great too see... perhaps the first line should be; RTFM.

[dan]

Never really used a WYSIWYG cms, got one in the pipeline though... I wait with baited breath to see what they do with it when it launches later this year. All the other cms's I've built/used are fairly predetermined, just forms with headline/subheadline/image upload etc the site does all the styling, But I know that's no help. Sometimes it just isn't enough.

I've got some crib sheets about optimising images using photoshop/image ready/photoshop elements somewhere that I give to clients who don't know any better, I'll see if I can route them out.

[mike_m]

that would be pretty helpful mate - cheers

[lucidcreations]

We've used this one quite few times now.

http://www.webwizguide.info/asp/samp...pplication.asp only work in IE but that isn't really a aproblem for an admin system.

We've hacked it around a bit to open, close and save the files we want and the toolbars are easy to setup.

[paulanthony]

I tend to stay clear of the WYSIWYG editors...best to just create a new field in a database for your heading, wrap it up in ur <h1> create more than one "template" for the position of text and images on the page, allowing client to choose how many image they want with their article etc. Limit the number of images to about 3 or 4. Otherwise they are going to be slow to load. Individually load the images in via a file upload and database insert...I know its a long way round but at least they have no control over how the text looks, as it will be inserted into a properly cssed table row etc. And use php, .NET or a component to resize images on the fly.

[paulanthony]

Oh and u can do a javascript or server side image size detect to tell them to piss off when they try to resize a 30MB JPEG dumped from their 6MP digi cam.

[lucidcreations]

Any one come up with a crib after?

[mike_m]

umm, not had much time to really get going on it yet.... just relying on telling clients off for the moment once they get the hang of it, they are generally alright though

so much to do...

will definitely post it up when I finish it - just hate writing documentation... honestly the last bit of documentation we put out was bigger than my dissertation!