Introduction

Description

The liberty content management system allows you set up and administer your own web pages on your site. It allows you to setup pages which automatically appear in site menus and site search facilities. For each page you can effectively have a mini site divided into categories and groups and each group can be further sub divided into individual items presented in a variety of formats. Each item can have a full graphical page setup with the Rich text editor (see Appendix C Rich Text Editor).

This document takes you step by step through the process to perform these actions.

Pre-planning your site

Before you begin to create pages on your site, you need to have considered the facts below to get a good looking site otherwise your site can look inconsistent and messy:

· Colour scheme.

Liberty gives you plenty of opportunity for defining different colours in places on your web site. You need to ensure that your colour scheme is thought through before you create your pages. This to a certain extent is done for you at design time by the web designer. What colour should the buttons be? Colour of the menu bar, background colour of the pages etc etc

· Page size

How wide will you have the pages in pixels?. This depends on how detailed your site will be and what your target audience is. In general your page width should be planned for about 800 -> 1024 pixels wide. However if your site is going to be read by children or visually impaired you may wish a smaller size such as 640. If your site holds lots of detailed technical information and will be viewed by experts then a larger size may be appropriate.

· Image size

With liberty you have the ability to upload images in a variety of places. However if you want lists to appear neat and you have photos (thumbnails) next to each item then these will need to be all a consistent size otherwise it will look messy. Consider this upfront.

· Text size

There are many places where you define the style and size of text on pages. Think about your fonts and the target audience. Whatever you decide it should be consistent throughout the site.

· Structure and layout of pages

There are many options for displaying pages in different ways. One of the key considerations is how you present your list of items on a page. If you have a page with many hundreds of items on it then you probably want to consider subdividing your page into categories. This makes it easier for the user to find what they are looking for. Try not to create too many pages as this will ‘clutter’ the menu for the site. It is better to have a page with many categories within it than to have separate pages for each category.

Individual screen descriptions

User Logon Page

Before you use the system you must logon.

To do this enter your allocated userid (in box 4.) and password (in box 5.) and press the Logon button.

Once logged on3 key pieces of information are displayed at the top:

Company name. This is your company and should show correctly here.
Logged on userid. Once logged in your userid should always appear here while using the administration facility. NOTE: If it shows ‘none’ this means your log on has expired (after 20 minutes of inactivity or you have not yet logged on.
Software version number. This is important if you need support.

When logon is pressed you are taken to the main menu.

Main Menu

This page is choosing what administration function that you want to do.

The main menu can be accessed instantly in a variety of ways:

Pressing ‘Menu’ in the quick jump options (1.)
Pressing ‘Admin menu’ in any other screen on the Navigation path (2.)
After initial log on.

The quick jump options (1.) and Navigation path (2.) are available in any administration screen and can be used to quickly jump out of whatever you are doing and go somewhere else.

Click on any of the four large icons to choose that selected option. A brief description of each is as follows and they are further detailed in the pages below:

Global and page parameters. This is for setting site wide features such as default page colours, menu styles and orientations etc.
Categories and Groups. This is for sub dividing a page into categories. This is particularly useful if there are lots of items on one page and you want a user to view groups of them at a time rather than the whole lot.
Your web pages. This is for pages that you create for your site. You can create, amend or delete them from here.
Locked web pages. If your design was done as part of the liberty package then there will be certain pages that you have limited control over the display format such as the home page. You will however be able to edit certain areas on that page and this is what this section allows you to do.
Shipping prices. This is an ecommerce add on only. For defining the shipping policy of your shop, prices quantities etc. This can be per product or globally.
Discount policy. Where you define what discounts you are going to offer for based on quantity ordered either globally or for a specific product. Can specify promotional discount here also.

Global and page parameters

This page is for setting site wide features such as default page colours, menu styles and orientations etc.

Background Colour

This allows you to choose the default background colour for all pages in case a colour isn’t specified for a pages.

The choice of colours available is specified in Appendix A – Colour selection.

Menu position

The main web site menu is automatically updated and displays all of your web pages and the locked web pages. You can chooses whether this menu appears at the top of the page or on the left hand side.

Menu type

The menu can be one of three styles:

Hyperlinks. These are just text links in the style: home contact site search
Button. Pages available are presented as buttons This is a good option if you will not have too many pages on your site.
Dropdown. All pages are displayed in the form of a dropdown list. This option is especially good if you are going to have many pages on your site.

Menu colours

This allows you to choose from the range of colours in Appendix A, the menu colour style for the menu type selected. This is described in the following diagram:

Menu Alignment

Alignment of the menu on the page. Options are:

Left / Top. If the menu is at the top of the page then Left will left justify it. If on the left of the page then it will position it starting from the top of the page on the left.
Centre. If the menu is at the top of the page then Left will center justify it. If on the left of the page then it will position it in the middle of the page on the left.
Right / Bottom. If the menu is at the top of the page then Right will left justify it. If on the left of the page then it will position it starting from the bottom of the page on the left.

META Description / Keywords / Classification

These are used to specify SEO (search engine optimisation) parameters for your web site. This is the topic of a separate discussion and is not covered in this manual. Any values set here appear on every page and item unless specifically overridden on that page or item.

Categories and Groups

This allows you to subdivide a page in the ‘your web pages’ section into further groupings and classifications. This is especially useful if your page is very large and has lots of individual items on it. For example if you have a page that sells cars, and you have 200 to sell it would not be easy for a user to find what they are looking for. If you create some groupings such as ‘Hatchbacks’,’Saloons’ and ‘4x4’s then this will make the page easier to navigate to split up the large volume of items for sale.

The field names in all diagrams correspond to the same values. To see where the fields appear on the final web page look at the ‘Display view’. Remember to look at Appendix B – Common Administration Features for descriptions of common elements on this page.

Admin view

Field1: category code

This is a site wide unique code which you can make up as you wish. It is not displayed anywhere and is for internal use only. It is best to keep it short and relevant i.e. hatch01. Once a category has been saved this cannot be amended.

Field2: category name

This is the display name of the category and it is what users will see.

Field3: Description

This is a short description about what the category represents. It is displayed in the Gallery view for categories in a small paragraph.

Field4: Page

This is the page on which the category will be displayed. One page cannot see another pages categories.

Display view

The following is how the ‘Picture Hierarchy’ style categories are displayed and where the fields from the ‘Admin’ view are displayed:

The following is where the fields are displayed on ‘Dropdown’ style.

Creating a hierarchy or tree

The examples above are for one level of grouping only. You can further sub divide a group or category into many levels if you want just like a ‘tree’. The lowest level of a tree is always the list of items that are finally contained in the category.

Consider the following scenario:

Currently there are 4 categories all at the same level. If seen on the web page ‘Tree view’ then they would all appear together. What we want to do is move Level1.1 and Level1.2 so that they are children of Level1. To do this click on the ‘Children’ button of Level1. We are going to specify level 1.1 and level 1.2 as children of Level1.

You are presented with this page:

This is telling you that Level1 does not yet have any children defined for it. To add level1.1 click on ‘Add Child to Category’. Giving you the following :

The dropdown is populated with categories that are eligible to be added as a child. Categories that are already a child of another category will not appear in this list as they can only belong to one category at a time.

Select the desired category -in our case Level 1.1 and press Add. This gives you:

Next add the second one. Click ‘Add Child to Category’ again and choose ‘Level1.2’. Note that Level1.1 will not appear in the list as it now already is the child of a category. Click Add again. Both will now appear in the list as above. If you now go back to the Category page by clicking ‘Back to Category List’ you will see: