Five steps to creating a simple website using Easysite CMS.
Getting Started
This page details the key steps required to build a simple, five page website using Easysite. In reality, a clients website will contain significantly more than five pages. A member of the Ideagen project team will work closely with during the design and build stages of the project. Full product training will also be provided. However, the following points should be considered, whatever the size of the project.
1. Define a Site Structure
Before any work can be undertaken have a plan for the site layout. Whether this is designed using a spreadsheet or scribbled on a napkin over lunch, the site structure and page layout inform every aspect of Easysite.
2. Add Users and Groups
Before you can undertake any work on building out the site, you will need to be logged in. Every Easysite installation come with a default administration account. Login with this account and create a user account for yourself. Next add your account to a group. Newly installed copies of Easysite have a default top level group called Power Users. Add yourself to this group.
You are now in a position to create user and groups.
User accounts are added to groups. Groups control access to the site. Referring back to your site structure, will you need to create groups to allow specific users to manage certain sections of the site? For example, if small team has responsibility for creating news articles, you may want to create a 'News Authors' group. This can be used to allow these users to only create and edit content within the News section of the site.
As with the site structure, it is worth documenting different types of access required for managing the site. Users and groups can then then be matched to the documentation. You can then create the appropriate groups and grant the required privileges (privileges determine what members of a group are allowed to do on a site). Next users can be created and added to these groups. Finally, assign page permissions (permissions determine which groups may access which pages).
3. Define a Category Structure
In the simplest terms categories act as folders or repositories for Easysite items. You may need 'folder' for Images or Documents, for example. Pages may also be added to categories. These categories may then be used to create lists of pages, such as a Latest News or What's New List. As with pages and users, it is worth creating a list of required categories. Questions to consider at this point include:
Do you have specific types of documentation that need storing together, for example Board Papers? Categories will be required to save these documents, possibly with sub-categories for years and months.
Do you want to generate lists of content related roles, locations or subject matter categories will be required to enable this. As an example, if we want to display a list of news stories of interest to end users in the East Midlands we will require two categories:
- A category to label content as news
- A category identify that the content is relevant to users in the East Midlands.
The mechanics of actually displaying these lists will covered during formal training, but it is useful to start defining what lists are required. To create a category list by adding System Categories to Easysite. Categories which will hold assets such as images or documents will then need to be imported in to the Asset Manager as Asset Categories.
4. Upload your assets
Upload some initial assets to the Asset Manager and categorise them. These assets could be images for your homepage or documents for end users to download.
5. Create your Templates
Each page on your website is based on a template. The template controls what content may be added to a page - for example placeholders for images are contained within the template. Before creating a template you will need to know what your finished pages should look like. You may employ a professional design agency to create visuals for you. Alternatively, there is always the other side of that napkin...
Create templates for your key pages. Note that In order to use a template it must be added to template category.
And now...
6. Start creating pages
You are now in a position to start populating your site!
For more information on creating and editing pages please see our Video tutorials and Help Articles.
