From a creative person’s perspective, designing for a content management system used to be akin to torture. The limitations imposed by those older systems would box designers into the most basic layouts. It was like giving a kindergartner nothing but a black crayon to color with.

Some time ago, one of our clients expressed a need to use modal dialogs to display biographical information about the members of their governance committee.  The expected end result was to produce a modal dialog (a kind of pseudo-popup, often referred to as a “lightbox”) whenever certain links are clicked.  The dialog needed to display text in the title bar and rich text content in the dialog window’s body. More...

I was reviewing some code for a past client with a colleague of mine recently, and they became very excited about one particular feature. We had customized the Hyperlink Manager so that it would automatically include a Google Analytics tracking event when the link was rendered – allowing the client to maintain an extensive analytics store when transferring to a Sitecore-based site. More...

This is the second half of a two-part series about designing for content management systems. The first half, which focuses on Flexibility and Manageability, can be read here. More...

Part 1: Flexibility and Manageability
Today's robust content management systems can handle the implementation of even the most complicated website designs with very few restrictions, but that doesn't mean designers should feel free to go hog-wild, designing and coding with utter abandon.

In addition to the typical things a modern web designer must consider with each project (such as usability, information architecture, functionality, user experience, and basic aesthetic principles), we also need to focus on optimizing our designs and code for the following interrelated considerations when designing for implementation into a CMS system: More...