Is it Possible

[Miko]

Hi
I am putting together a simple website for a friend which will be for Dog Grooming and other services. One page is to be called Dog Of The Month and each month a picture is to be added with a caption of the dogs name. At the end of the year there will be one picture for the Dog Of The Year so in total there will be thirteen pictures. My question is how can I achieve this. I will not be the one uploading the pictures so I will have to pass the instructions on. I am only a novice at this so be easy.

[ChrisBro]

The short answer is you cant, well you cant easily anyhow there are 3 solutions I can think of:

1/ You update the website every month for your friend you simply re-open your .web file goto the page where the phto is to be added/changed drag and drop it into place edit it then save, export and re-upload.

2/ Your friend buys a copy of web designer 6 and does what I said above.

3/ Your friend has the main site designed by you, then runs a blog from the back end of the site that they are fully in control of so they can add their own blog posts and images as and when they want, you could link the blog from the main site or even link pages of the blog so dog of the month from menu buttons on the main site.

There are a few other options such as image galleries etc but none of these will be incorporated into the actual site design and would require some kind of server knowledge to install and get up and running.

Depending on your friends host you could install a blog in as little as 1 mouse click Wordpress is one of the most popular self hosted solution, it has a great community and tons of templates and add on's.

Keep an eye on this thread because somebody may chime in with another solution I personally cant think of one, it is generally the job of the designer to update a site, maybe you could build it with your friend so that they know how to do it themselves when the site is complete?

Bottom line there isn't a magical way of just uploading an image and it appearing in the design.

Hope that helps

Chris

[jimhanus]

I have 2 different sites that clients update themselves. Both use inline frames (IFRAME) to display changed content. One site has a newsletter and calendar in PDF displayed every month. The newsletter is called "newsletter.pdf" and the calendar is called "calendar.pdf". They create their new file with the same name every time and ftp upload it. It then replaces the existing file.

The second uses an iframe that displays an html page that is an export from an Excel spreadsheet. Same thing; as long as the file name stays the same visitors will see the new content.

You could make a page with 13 .jpg thumbnails named 1 through 13 in placeholders. Have the client upload a new .jpg every month named 1, 2, 3, etc. which will replace your original 1,2,3 etc. Viewers will see the new content after it's uploaded. Original .jpgs could just be a "Coming Soon" .jpg or a thumbnail matching the background color so it looks blank. The client only needs the new .jpg and an FTP program to upload it, along with your instructions as to size, etc. Here's one of the pages with the Excel/html content in an Iframe: http://www.fostermychoice.com/rescurrentoffers.htm

Sledger has a good video on how to do this: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=45034

Jim

[ChrisBro]

Hi Jim

Thats a great solution I always forget how useful Iframes can be, I dont use them much personally so they never spring to mind as a solution to problems like this.

Thinking about it you could do the same with a placeholder and then replace with image as long as the file names were consistent it would just be a case of the client uploading the new images into the index_html_files folder every month.

Good thinking

Chris

[slavelle]

And if you really want to get adventurous, you can build (or hire someone else to build) a few small php scripts with a mySql database behind it that will let someone add their own content via a small form.

It's like CMS-superlight. I just did one where the site owner can change the information in the right side-bar with a simple form input. That sidebar is simple a placeholder which has a small bit of html/php to open the database, read the table, and place the two fields (title and description) in the placeholder box. Ideally, what's in here will just fit, though it will add scrollbars just in case they add too much in there. It also has a little bit of styling in an internal stylesheet to make the text that comes up as embedded <h1> and <p> tags. It sounds really complicated, but it's really pretty simple.

Pictures are a little bit more difficult because you have to have a way for them to upload and for some reason, people are intimidated by FTP. You also have to be able to depend on them puting up properly sized and ratio'd pictures - most people don't know or care about these things, but you have to.

I'm doing an embedded Gallery for a client's site and I thin kI'm gong to be using simpleviewer for that, as it allows for a Flickr account to be the feed of pictures for it as well as their captions. You could do a similar thing where the caption each month is the Month and the Dog name or whatever. This way, as the year goes, the Gallery would grow with the monthly winners all being presented. Just another thought for you.

CushyCMS, Surreal CMS, or similar would also be an option for parts of this, though I'd rather keep at least most of the control than to put it out in the hands of a "startup" that could just go the way of the dodo and most of these "code replacement" sites seem like they are pretty new concepts. Just not sure about them enough yet to know that they are going to stick around.

Hope this long-winded post helps.

[Miko]

Thank you to all for the replies, all very helpful and which I will follow up. Just another question on the matter. I know that once you export the site to HTML you cannot bring it back into Designer for editing. Can you import the site into another editor. I have tried it with a couple without any luck? If this could be done with a free editor say, then the other person could add the photos and then upload - just a thought.

[jimhanus]

No you can't. Do a search in TalkGraphics for WYSIWYG.

Jim

[slavelle]

I know that once you export the site to HTML you cannot bring it back into Designer for editing. Can you import the site into another editor.

As Jim said, not really. That said, if you want to edit the site in the future, you can of course edit it in Xara and export as many times as you need to.

The code that Xara puts out is very specific and won't look like anything else you've seen and odds are pretty good that you or someone else will not want to work with the code directly, regardless of their editor. The only real exception to this is for minor changes, like if you made a pselling mistake and don't have access to the original Xara file, you can fix it in the code and upload to your site - just don't forget to make the change to the original Xara source as soon as you can.

Again - you really don't WANT to edit the code by hand. It's not really meant to be done - the rule can be broken but only for really minor stuff.

Hope that helps.

[DavidDB]

I have Created sites with iFrames using Google Docs too - to allow a client to update things like "Job Vacancies"

in another site site I have iframed A Picassa Slideshow - and set one folder on their PC to auto upload anything dropped into a "Web Slide-show" folder in Picassa desktop client

Works flawlessly for years

Now if someone would create an iFrame widget I would be a happy man - paste in a url ... set size and publish

[steve.ledger]

Like this?

(Drag it into your page and follow the destructions )