Profile: Helle Damgaard Andersen

Helle Damgard Andersen is webmaster at Copenhagen Business School.

As webmaster she is responsible for the overall administration of the CMS, such as making structures/websites for e.g. departments and study programmes, user administration, helpdesk for the local editors and programming templates. Content editing is delegated to local editors at departments and other units.

Presentation: Implementing and administrating a CMS

Thursday, November 10th, 11.00

Track: Technology

Case: Copenhagen Business School

In this presentation I want to focus on two issues: what is important when you start building your CMS and the daily tasks involved in administrating a CMS for a large website.

Building a CMS

Regarding the building of the CMS I will concentrate on two things:

1. Design.
Once the details of the (graphic) design is decided, this need to be implemented into the CMS as code. You need to decide which language you should choose (e.g. XHTML 2.0) and what principles (e.g. tables or no tables), how to organize your CSS, should you make your own code or buy it and what about browser types/versions.

2. Building the system with templates, classes, object types etc.
In our system (www.ez.no) content is stored/organized in classes, and templates take care of the presentation.
The actual programming of the templates is one thing, another is getting used to the philosophy of a CMS - and the latter takes a while (especially if you have run a system with ordinary HTML files).
A CMS has several advantages: Editing objects/pages are much easier, design and structure can be much more controlled, content can be re-used etc.
But a CMS requires a lot more planning and structure than a basic system with HTML files. As an example I will show how we have organized news and events at CBS and some of the traps involved in this: how simple should the system be made compared to flexibility for the local editor.

Administrating a CMS

At CBS we have 1-1.5 webmaster and ca. 150 local (content) web-editors. While the initial template programming was done by a consultant, the administration including further template programming is done by ourselves, except for larger and more complicated template tasks which are delegated to the consultant.

Besides developing the system we write guidelines and carry out courses for the local editors.

Furthermore we function as a helpdesk to the local web-editors. For this we use a bugtracker, which has improved both our service level and our own overview of the daily tasks. Finally we of course take care of documenting the system - and the importance of documentation cannot be stressed too much.

In my presentation I will show how we take care of these tasks.

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