WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

The CMS challenge
It doesn’t take too much web browsing to find common
visual formatting of content on various websites. Such
generic patterns are usually dictated by restrictions in the
content templates of the particular CMS behind those
sites. You can see these common elements on sites managed
by popular blog CMSs, sites running expensive
commercial packages, and even custom-built systems.
This is the case with the custom CMS used by Geffen/
Universal Media to manage its artists’ sites. In order to ease
mass updates of content formatting, all their sites use the
same categories of data, such as News, Media, Photos,
Events, and so on. Sites running on this CMS share a single
set of content templates. While this makes adjustments to
a given block of content much easier to implement, the
approach has resulted in many of the sites having a similar
look. This is due in large part to the designers’ perception
that the content needs to look the same because the
markup can’t be customized on a site-by-site basis.
For my Lifehouse site redesign project, Geffen/Universal
Media didn’t request any specific goals, aside from wanting
a design that did a better job of reflecting the band’s
image and current promotional photography than the
existing site. From a design perspective, that’s as good as
a blank slate, and that’s essentially the instruction I was
given, with one big restriction: whatever I produced had
to work with the existing CMS content templates.
This wasn’t the first artist site I had worked on for the company,
so I was already familiar with most of the restrictions
imposed by the centralized structure of the CMS templates.
This meant I already knew exactly what categories
and types of content the design had to accommodate, and
what restrictions lay ahead of me.
Like my earlier projects, this redesign had a tight deadline
and budget, which had previously led to a quick-and-dirty
approach to the design process: take the basic set of content
and layout templates—a standard two-column
layout with header and footer—and skin them to look as
un-template-like as possible, while staying within budget.
The Lifehouse site redesign would have been the same, if
I hadn’t become so darned fed up with the limiting effect
that approach was having on my designs.
So, faced with the prospect of another boring design
project, I proposed an experiment: let me see how much
I could massage the content and layout to break out of
the basic template mold, without changing the budget or
the timeline. After receiving the green light from the
client, it was time to get down to business and start
designing something—quickly.
chapter 2 Taming a Wild CMS with CSS, Flash, and JavaScript
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