Case Study: Web admin tools

BrandLogic's approach to building admin tools for our Web sites has always been to create ones that match our clients' work flow. Rather than requiring users to learn a new program and a new procedure, we build our tools around their processes.

For example, it took 30 minutes with the site maintainers for Guideposts to understand that a calendar metaphor would be the best solution to help them keep track of their daily content updates. Combining a one-page snapshot of the current month and easy archival retrieval of past content made daily update changes an easy task.

With Texaco, it was important that users of their Brand Asset Management site be informed of any changes. We made this task easy by providing an automatic, optional e-mail that administrators could chose to send every time they made a change to the site. The site kept track of user downloads and would notify only users who had previously downloaded a file when a new file was available.

For St. John's University, the need was obvious; the entire university needed to add new pages to the site, yet there needed to be centralized control of all new content on the site. To solve this dilemma, we created a distributed author/publisher content management tool that provided WYSIWIG editing of Web pages, and approval by authorized administrators before any page could go live.

The benefits of having admin tools that match your work flow are ease-of- maintenance, reduced training time, and increased efficiencies. Perhaps the biggest benefit is the ownership our clients feel for their Web site when they have a tool that works for them, rather than a tool they have to work to use.