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I am looking to revamp our CRUD web forms and would appreciate any examples of good UI design.
We have lots of database tables that have minimal editing needs by the user - Country Codes, Tax codes, Product prices, and so on - and these all currently use a simple format for CRUD, but it was designed by developers and looks very bland, and quite possibly could have far better usability, and certainly a better design.
Our process is:
Find screen - which also has an ADD NEW button. Enter values for any parameters relevant to search for and press FIND button. Matching records displayed in a grid with an EDIT link. The corresponding Edit form allows CLONE, DELETE and SAVE.
Where appropriate an Edit form may display Child Records.
For very complex records / relationships the Edit form is replaced by a Record Card, which displays everything including the kitchen sink! and appropriate records / sub records have EDIT links.
Its functional, but uninspiring.
On an 80:20 basis the code is all mechanically generated, so re-generating it for a new metaphor shouldn't be too hard.
I like a lot of the UI in the Magento eCommerce Admin pages, but I would be interested in any other examples you can recommend
Here are some examples of UI patterns:
Input Controls
Stacked Tabs
Inline Input Adder
One Page Wizards
Overlay
Generally each section will explain the pattern, how and why to use, and gives a handful of graphics as real world examples.
As an additional resource, you can also visit ThemeForest's admin template site and browse through their many products and get pictures and live tours of very well designed and styled admin pages. I personally have used a few of these templates for data heavy sites.
Hope these help you out some.
7/25/18 Update: While it is hard to keep links from nine years ago working, it seem that the website which hosted the UI examples is now gone. Read Farewell from Patternry for further information.
Links worth a look:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/04/17/web-form-design-modern-solutions-and-creative-ideas/
http://somerandomdude.com/articles/design/form-design/
The Dynamic Data Web Site that you can create using .Net 3.5 is pretty handy. Good clean dynamic CRUD ability and yet very customizable. Routing makes it possible to default to generated pages when needed and custom pages if you choose to create them.
Dynamic Data Web Site
These guys have really nice examples-
http://wufoo.com/gallery/
To me, the Django admin interface is a good example of a CRUD interface.
I've just stumbled onto this one
there you will find a couple of REALLY GREAT templates!!!
http://www.webappers.com/2009/09/18/20-professional-web-admin-templates-on-themeforest/
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I have designed a website for my brother's company using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.
How can I create a content management system (CMS) for him to let him easy to edit or post news in his website? I think that using Dreamweaver will be difficult for him.
Any CMS is going to require server-side scripting. Typically one starts with a CMS framework, and then designs the theme around it. There is no easy way to "CMSify" your Dreamweaver design. I suggest you take a look at the Wordpress framework, which will require a PHP backend. Here is a link to a tutorial on creating custom Wordpress themes.
It's not an easy task if you don't have any experience with scripting, but depending of the complexity of the website there are some good options. What I mean is, depending on how much dynamic the site will be. Put yourself some questions like:
Is the website mostly static, and only some text areas and images have to be updated? Or are there more dynamic parts that involve the creation of new pages, like a blog or a "products" page? Do you need a friendly backend, or would your brother be ok with updating text in text files? Will it be only your brother updating the content, of he will need to manage several users?
The degree of difficulty for you will be proportional to the degree of friendliness of updating to your brother/users.
Depending on the answers to those questions you can use something has:
as a file based CMS without interface (Kirby) or with (Monstra,
razorCMS)
A very simple to convert but also very basic CMS (Surreal, Cushy,
Perch)
A full blown CMS that will take longer to learn, but give
all the flexibility to do whatever you want (there
are many choices, but Processwire is my absolute favourite)
Rather than creating a CMS, try installing an existing one that will import your static pages and perform the main steps of making them work in the new system. It's not that hard to do from scratch, but many web hosts will have some of these systems pre-installed. You can find out what CMSs your web host offers, and then Google "[name of CMS] import html".
The MODX CMS (modx.com) has some decent tools for importing HTML into the system. Detailed instructions here.
WordPress has various plugins you can install to do the same thing, including HTML Import 2. Detailed instructions here.
WordPress works best for people who like a simpler interface. MODX works best for people who like design control, and also for people who plan on doing a lot of their own code to extend the system.
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I want to choose a CMS that will be part of my infrastructure for my company websites.
What do you think are the questions I need to ask before I really choose one?
Choosing a CMS is almost like choosing a framework.
Thanks
Your two starting questions should be about people:
Who will be building and maintaining the technology? If your organisation's IT department is in love with Microsoft solutions, then find the best .NET CMS that meets your needs (Umbraco, Kentico, DotNetNuke etc). If you have no money but you're fairly IT-savvy and have a couple of Web designers on tap to help you out, then a designer-friendly free system like MODX Revolution makes sense. If some of your people have worked with a big system like Drupal, then that's your leading candidate.
Who will be adding content to the system? Internal users will want an interface that rewards use - it must react fast, protect the user from losing their work, make content easy to find, and ease tasks like creating new pages and including links and images. That might push you towards CMS Made Simple, or even WordPresss if your needs are otherwise modest. And if most of the content will be contributed by a user community, the CMS must support a strong forum capability.
After that, take a look at Step Two's document How to evaluate a content management system. These guys know their stuff. You may even want to buy their Content Management Requirements Toolkit. Their evaluation document gives you a starting point for your evaluation.
Do bear in mind, though, that not all requirements are created equal. For instance, many CMS texts stress the importance of complex workflow and versioning. In large publishing businesses, these sometimes matter a lot. In most smaller organisations they don't matter as much. Your workflow may consist of one person putting content into the system and another approving it to go live - the sort of task that can be accomplished with a staging server and email. Versioning may be adequately covered by a regular back-up.
And remember above all that when you put a CMS in an existing organisation, you're engaging in politics. You need to find out what people want, show you're delivering it, explain to them the considerations which they don't know about but which have to be taken into account, and convince them you're acting to bring them the best possible tool. Good luck.
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I have never used a CMS before nor have I built a E-commerce site before so I have several questions regarding this and choosing one:
My background:
I am not a programmer: I am a designer and I am proficient with using HTML and CSS, as well as having some experience using and "tweeking" some Jquery Plugins such as sliders, picture viewers, to use in my markup.
I need help choosing the right CMS to build a E-commerce site for a very small shop and my choice of CMS must meet these requirements:
1) most important: the site must do some sort of automatic SEO for the products added using the names of the products, ie "poster of michael jackson".
2) most important #2: The website doesn't have to keep stats on a million things or have a million random features but the products we will be selling on this site MUST have a second level of variables to go with their choice. ie when the the buyer chooses to purchase the "michael jackson poster" - then they must be able to choose the "poster frame style" and see the choices in thumbnails for example of what these frames look like (wood, plastic, metal) and also other options such as "poster glass choice" with several types of glass to choose as variables
3) It has a very easy to use backend for my client (who knows nothing about websites) to update content.
4) Something I can set up without being a programmer given my skill set listed above. I can purchase or use a free template to get started but i'd like to eventually be able to stylize the site myself to give it my own theme/look and front end UI features such as a picture slide show or something I want to build/plugin that may not be part of the template.
Thanks in advance! I'm very very new to this stuff.
p.s. i was looking at magento, is that a good one for these requirements?
one option is an all-in-one hosted system like shopify, volusion, corecommerce, or yahoo stores. you can totally customize the design, but they handle the e-commerce engine and have seo compatibility... magento is excellent and is very customizable.
Exact Abacus offer Ecommerce software that seems to tick all your boxes. Its probably unlike anything you've seen before, so definitely worth a look.
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I've just picked up a contract to sort out a vipers-nest of e-commerce websites that a previous 'developer' left for one of my clients. There's about a couple of dozen of them using a custom shopping cart and CMS system that's too embedded to dump and works well enough, but desperately needs cleaning up, re-factoring, and bug fixing, so a reasonably substantial recoding job.
As part of this my client is desperate to ensure the best search engine placement he can get. Like many developers I've a nodding acquaintance with the idea, but no real knowledge, and it seems that it would be helpful to get up to speed on this so I can build appropriately into the code.
So can people advise on useful quality resources - books, websites, blogs etc? I do not wish to obsess over every last detail on this (he can use a specialist if he decides to pull every last ounce out - although I've always regarded such as little better than snake-oil peddlers), but I would like to build code and reconfigure templates in a manner that helps rather than hinders placement.
Look at Wikipedia with styles off. See how they order their content? See how they use correct tags to label the content? These are the keys to long term success.
The most important SEO advice is to create a semantic, logical site. The content comes first and is ordered by importance. Use the correct tags, don't do tables. Then apply styles. Then apply script to make it fancy. (Like Tomas said)
Know the difference between what is content (pictures of your products) and not (your logo tiled on the background). Basically do your best to present good content in a good way. You can't game the system for long term gains.
This will give you long term placement. Most SEO companies just do tricks or links farms or worry about keywords and meta tags, so they are temporary at best. I think it is good to assume that Google works just as hard to drop that crap from it's index as the SEO marketers do to include it.
According to Google's patent
Age of domain.
Important sites that link to you.
Content. Make it real and accurate.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741
A main concern when thinking SEO should always be usability. Make sure the mark-up is semantic, make sure the site works without javascript, css and images - in other words, make sure that 'low-level browsers' are able to read the contents of your page. Think of optimizing the site for a screen reader for the blind and visually impaired, and you will automatically cover the search engines, because that is exactly what they are - blind browsers.
A standard no-no is a table layout, mainly because it does not order the site content by relevance. To a human being reading your site, it is no problem looking two inches down instead of at the very top of your page, but the screenreader reads the code, not the visual view.
Thus, you should make sure that you have the important things - a high-level heading (preferrably <h1> or <h2>), the main menu (in a <ul> list) and the content in divs at the top of the source, and less important content (the logo, banners, quickmenus etc that aren't really crucially needed to be accessible) further down. You are always able to re-order where the stuff is actually shown in your css.
New tag to use called CANONICAL can now also be used, from Google, click HERE
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A client of ours is a membership organization and they are looking for functionality that seems closely aligned with Google Sites capabilities.
They want a system where their members can have a content managed site of their own that one or more admins can create by submitting a simple form.
The member organization could then add/remove pages, add/edit/remove content, add their own users, modify their color scheme and layout.
They would like the ability to have a url structure like, "member_org_url_to_be_named/member_name" - but it could also be subdomains (i.e. "member_name.member_org_url_to_be_named").
So they need a security hierarchy to be able to have different levels of users:
Admin - can add/edit/remove sites, users, etc.
Member Admin - can add/edit content within their site, add users that are also able to add/edit content within their site.
Member user - can add/edit content within their site.
From what I've seen and read, Google Sites seems to be able to handle this functionality. It's a little difficult to get in touch with someone there who would be able to tell me this definitively, however. So I'm wondering if there are any other platforms that might be able to handle this workflow.
Obviously, I'd love to hear from anyone who has implemented a system like this before. I'd also love to hear from anyone who has actually used Google Sites.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I don't know much about Sites though.)
Have you actually tried to use Google Sites for this? It strikes me that it shouldn't take very long to give it a whirl. If you have any Sites-specific questions, the Google Sites help centre and user forum are probably good starting places.
This sounds like content management with roles. Drupal fits this purpose pretty much perfectly.
http://drupal.org/
I've used Google Sites (the free "standard edition") a very little bit, it was easy to setup + easy to reconfigure my DNS records via nearlyfreespeech.net to setup CNAME and MX records to a domain I own.
The mailing list stuff works nicely. The site editing is very easy for anyone to use but a bit slllllooooowwww and somewhat clumsy, and doesn't appear to "play nicely" with the concept of uploading/downloading via FTP/SFTP/etc. I don't like the idea of my group's users spending all this time developing a website, that I can't backup or transfer to someone other than Google if I run into an issue.
I don't know if these issues are addressed in the pay version of Google Sites. For the moment I'm definitely keeping the email-mailing-list features going, but looking around elsewhere for something similar that works better.
(If you find something please post!)