Web Sites Made EasyWeb Sites Made Easy

Content-management vendor Stellent Inc. this week introduced a tool designed to make it easier for content contributors, editors, and Web-site designers to update Web content while providing strong, centralized control of site elements.

Site Studio replaces Stellent's Content Publisher tool, replacing its predecessor's coding-dependent architecture with a drag-and-drop template and the ability to edit directly from a live Web page. That lets Web-site managers ensure that all of a company's sites conform to a single look and feel, while the simplified user interface makes it easy for nontechnical users to update pages.

Seattle Public Utilities, a city department that supplies water, sewer, and solid-waste services to 1.3 million residents in the Seattle area, has been testing Site Studio and is sold on the software, says Web manager Lisa Perrin. Currently, the department uses a highly manual process in which content contributors make changes to the native content files, then E-mail those changes to the IT staff for posting. "Right now, we're a big bottleneck," Perrin says.

The new software will give contributors and editors three options: using the somewhat complex interface of Stellent's underlying Content Server platform; dragging and dropping updated files into the appropriate Web-page folder using a traditional file structure; or navigating to the page in question and calling up indicators that will let users make changes directly to the live page. Administrators also can easily control workflow by setting up automatic routing for approval where necessary.

Site Studio is priced from $25,000 to $100,000, depending on the size of the deployment. It must run on Stellent Content Server, which is priced between $50,000 and $200,000.