Knee Deep in Web Content, Among Other Updates
We are spending much of our time these days writing content for the new site. This includes writing many profiles for the new “Faces” faculty, student, and alumni Flash piece, a bank of stories for the new home page’s Wall gallery, and content for the many new pages we will be adding to the site. It’s all hands on deck for the Communications and Marketing staff as each member of our office is writing Web profies. We’re also gearing up to have a handful of students to assist us during winter break with pulling content out of our current Web site and readying it so it can be easily posted in the new CMS.
Should We Use Underscores or Hyphens in URLs?
As part of our implementation of Ingeniux CMS, we’ve had to decide how we want URLs to read (i.e., how will the page name read in a browser’s address bar).
Out of the box, Ingeniux displays page URLs as numbers with an .xml extension (e.g., 345.xml). Although, this method is short and clean, numbers aren’t real memorable. It’s much easier for site visitors to remember academics.html or news.html than 345.xml. You have some inclination where academics.html will take you when clicked, whereas 345.xml is pretty vague.
To present more human-readable URLs, Ingeniux allows us to utilize structured URLs using a hyphen or an underscore as a separator and specify .htm or .html as an extension. So which is better, hyphens or underscores? For me it has always come down to usability, something we touch on during each CMS training. It is much easier to read a Web address done in hyphens than underscores, especially when including URLs in print. If URLs appear as underlined text, the underscores are often harder to read.
When it comes down to it, search engines treat both underscores and hyphens differently. Google for example treats hyphens as separators or dividers while underscores are not treated as such as shown below.
Underscores vs. Hyphens
Example 1: www.anselm.edu/my_web_page.html
Example 2: www.anselm.edu/my-web-page.html
How Google reads these URLs.
Example 1: mywebpage
Example 2: my web page
Ingeniux CMS Training in Seattle
I spent all of last week in Seattle attending CMS training at Ingeniux’s offices. It was time very well spent.
I came away from the week of training even more impressed with Ingeniux, especially it’s flexibility and robustness as a CMS. The first day we covered all of Ingeniux’s terminology and their use – site controls, components, page types, navigation types (taxonomy vs. standard navigation), among others. We covered workflow and permissions as well as the underlying technology that powers Ingeniux – XML, XSLT (stylesheets), and schemas. It was a lot to pack into five days.
Ingeniux Selected as New Content Management System
I’m pleased to announce that we have selected Ingeniux as our new content management system (CMS). The selection comes after nearly eight weeks of work and with considerable assistance and input from our Web vendor, BarkleyREI, and the CMS Selection Group, which included staff, faculty, and student representation.
The CMS finalists were Ingeniux (based in Seattle) and Hannon Hill (based in Atlanta). Both CMSs have a strong foothold in the higher education space with hundreds of college implementations between the two companies. Both CMS companies spent a full day on campus in April where they met with the Web staff, key staff from Information Technology, and provided two-hour demos of their CMSs in front of our selection group.
We started the CMS selection process with a clear understanding of our CMS functional requirements and objectives. These were communicated early on in the Web redesign project in the original RFP and then again during the CMS selection process. Both vendors submitted full proposals, which covered in detail how they matched up against our functional requirements. Their on-site demos also addressed how each product addressed our requirements. Both Hannon Hill and Ingeniux met most of these requirements, but in the end, Ingeniux came out on top. Read more