» moving administration out of the admin section

moving administration out of the admin section

Focusing on the tiny details that create an awesome user experience is important to keep users.But if not enough attention is paid to how the website owner manages his site: if it’s too difficult for him to change some text or otherwise improve his content, then his motivation flags. The amount of time he’ll spend creating new content, improving existing content, sorting information to help users navigate quicker, etc will decrease and the quality of the site and the emotions of the users will suffer as a result if they sense the owner’s heart isn’t really in it.So improving the way a site owner administers a site and emphasizing direct involvement is also important to the ultimate user-experience, and it shouldn’t be relegated to afterthought status.

Traditional methods of administrating websites

Interestingly enough, I’ve learned there are still quite a few small-business websites out there that edit everything manually and have no CMS to speak of.

In the days before content-management systems became prominent, editing HTML by hand (or through something like FrontPage) was how websites were edited. Then content-management systems became ubiquitous and it’s been possible to edit most of your website through a series of pages and forms that store information in a database.

A screenshot of my current CMS, WordPress.

wordpress admin forms And over time, obviously, these forms have improved. For instance, here are some looks at the WordPress redesign by Happy Cog.So it is certainly possible to create a more beautiful-looking and usable menu for a a website owner and administrator to manage his website.But in certain situations, in certain contexts, is there an even better way to manage a site?

Rethinking the entire problem

Why should the owner of a website have to go to a separate menu screen to change something so simple as his website’s catchphrase?Why can’t an admin change the default email address of his contact form directly from his contact form page instead of mucking around in some menu a few layers deep in his administration section?Why should a real-estate agent who wants to change the order that a bunch of house photos are presented in go to a separate menu screen and mess with a ton of drop-down menus instead of doing the task directly from a particular house’s information page and seeing things as a prospective customer sees them?Etc.If you’re reading this article, you’re likely technically-inclined enough to eventually figure out how to use almost any administrative functionality in any program. But many computer users learn how to do stuff through memorization and just can’t think in terms of files and centralized systems.Why shouldn’t everybody have much more direct access to all of their information?As much as realistically possible, why not allow admins to have a few different options for directly manipulating their data within the program and specific page itself?

What do I mean by directly manipulating data?

Do it within the appropriate page itself, not some administrative section or a separate editing page.

Flickr does this beautifully in terms of things like editing titles for photos with a simple click.As much as realistically possible, and depending on context and appropriateness, administration should be directly within the related screen itself to encourage those in charge to stay active within their community.

Why doesn’t this happen more often?

* It’s a lot easier to think from a centralization standpoint instead of actually considering that the best way to manage a community is to manage it right from within the guts of the application.* If you have to write a lot more distributed code to write to solve a problem as optimally as possible, it involves a lot more testing to make sure it works securely and as intended in every circumstance. It’s a lot more effort.* Figuring out all of the particular security policies is also difficult and time-consuming. You have to think about who gets access to which actions. People who are logged out, people who are logged in, and people with certain admin permissions get access to different bit of functionality. Figuring out all of this stuff involves thought.

Speaking of performance, Yahoo (who I’m ordinarily not a huge fan of) has a great bunch of interesting performance tips that are worth checking out.

* Actually thinking logically about each and every intended use is necessary. Making sure data isn’t unnecessarily pre-loaded and harming performance is a concern.

Conclusion

I’m going to be writing some about some more about a few ideas that are shaping my coming software over the next few weeks. For now, just mentioning that the site administration is partially within the site itself is something I wanted to mention because I think directly manipulating your information can be a better way for many people to do things in many contexts.

Posted on March 21st, 2008 by Chris Papadopoulos.

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