Design for CMS

photo credit: myuibe

I’ve been writing quite a lot about design in the real world lately but haven’t touched one topic particularly close to me - moving the design into a CMS.

One thing that designers or people like me, that take the designs and turn them into an awesome HTMLs, need to remember is that the project is not in a vacuum and needs to be managed somehow. How to do it? Answer is simple - put your designed site into a CMS - content management system and manage your site from there.

Unfortunately with all the good things that using CMS can give you there are some new issues to take into account. Bottom line is that when doing the designs you need to consider platform the initial project will be using.

What are those things that you need to consider? Well here is a short list for you

• element’s ID attributes - working on EPiServer written using ASP.NET taught me this valuable lesson: you don’t always get full control of your code. In this particular example ASP.NET takes control of ID attributes of dynamic elements on the page. Not cool but good to know.
• contained components - while writing your HTML remember that all those functional elements on the site will turn out to be components inside the CMS. Write your code so it can be easily contained and turned into independent components
• reuse of design - while creating the design itself as in creating components think about reuse of the design in order to produce more consistent styling.
• user generated content - this is crucial. editors will fill all the designed and developed templates with all kinds of content. Your design must brace itself for it. All kinds of strange things might happen here. And I am talking about “paste text from MS Word” strange.
• old browsers support - if your client is serious about his business this will require from you to produce a solution that will work in all sorts of browsers like IE6 (or even lower) as either you like it or not this is still a major part of the browser market.

Seems like many things to consider but trust me it is worth it. Taking all things in consideration will save you time when actually converting HTMLs into CMS’ templates.

And what about you? Do you take the platform of a site into consideration while designing or producing HTMLs? Or you just don’t think about and let your artistic soul wonder?