New whitepaper: Why front-end development is crucial

Coding effective templates for a content management system (CMS) driven website is often overlooked and results in a poor CMS build.  A website will continuously expand through its duration. Without a solid foundation, things can get messy quick. 

NLC has just released a new whitepaper: “Why front-end development is crucial.” The goal of this paper is to help you avoid common pitfalls when building your foundation to ensure existing content can be edited easily, and new content and sections can be added.

This whitepaper is part of NLC’s thought leadership series. For more information or to check out other whitepapers, visit the whitepaper section of the NLC website.

It seems more and more organizations are churning out guidelines, policies and codes of conduct for social media use by their employees, both official and not. This is a great development.

As we’ve written before, a good policy will cover off three key points:

• how the organization will conduct itself in social channels;
• how employees will be expected to conduct themselves in social channels; and
• how the public wil be allowed to conduct themselves on social properties owned or curated by the organization.

The Government of Alberta recently joined the movement to define expectations for social media use by public servants and departments (PDF). While they do a fine job of covering off all three of these areas, one of their points related to the first deserves particular praise.

The footer has always been an underused page element. In fact, as a designer, I was trained to use the footer as nothing more than a nice way to finish off a website page layout. For years I’ve been using this approach and only placing elements such as the disclaimer, copyright and privacy policy in the footer.

Now, however, we are seeing the trend in which sites utilize this screen element to provide supporting navigation and extra information really taking hold. These expanded footers, which you’ll now find on most major-brand sites, are being adopted more widely as a way to provide added value to the visitor.

It’s ok, we’ve all been there. You pour your blood, sweat, tears and money into setting up a content management system (CMS) with the best intentions in the world. Your vision is spot on. You know what you want and why you want it.

Then reality sets in. Corners get cut. Features don’t do what you expect.

Time for a rescue mission.