As a trainer, I’m always looking for ways to help our clients get more value from SiteExecutive. Since we launched SiteExecutive 2011 EP 1 in May, we’ve received plenty of feedback on new features from across our user community. Working with this feedback as a starting point, I’ve come up with a set of SE 2011 tips and tricks you can use to enhance the overall effectiveness of your Web and mobile sites.

In this blog I’ll focus on the four most significant enhancements, beginning with the new Image Gallery.

Image Gallery

With the SiteExecutive Image Gallery you can upload images from local or network drives. Images can be in various formats including .jpg and .png and depending on your site, you can create one or more galleries. For example, if you run a college website you might have galleries for residential life, events, athletics and admissions.

SiteExecutive image galleries can be styled in a variety of different ways. You can customize the look and feel of your photo galleries to set them apart from others on the Web.  Also, because they’re housed, contained and managed in SiteExecutive, the SE image gallery is easier to manage than third party slideshow applications like Flickr or Snapfish.

Image Gallery Tip – Images must be uploaded to the image gallery; they can’t be selected from within the SE explorer.  If you organize your images into a standardized structure before you begin your upload, you can upload them all at once saving a ton of time.

Video Library

The SiteExecutive Video Library lets you aggregate videos from different sources like YouTube, Vimeo and/or our own MediaExecutive hosted video service and display them on your own website. For example, if you have YouTube playlists for different departments or constituents, you can use the video library to bring those together and display them on your site – the idea being you keep visitors on your site rather than sending them to YouTube.

Like the image gallery, the video library can be styled using cascading style sheets for complete customization.  However, out of the box the application comes with its own default style sheet, making it fast and easy to deploy live on your site.

Video Library Tip – as noted above, the video library is great for aggregating lots of videos into a central gallery. However, you can also use it for placing specific videos on targeted pages. Also, you can configure the library so the individual video displayed changes whenever the most current content in the library changes. Thus, you don’t have to remember to go back and check for new videos – automatic and easy!

Event Calendar

Among its many new features, the new event calendar app lets your site visitors submit events via the Web. This is very useful for instances where you want to encourage visitor participation, such as capturing events or workshops visitors might like to see on the calendar.

To ensure content quality, the submission process incorporates an approval workflow notification.  You or an authorized SiteExecutive user can review submissions, edit as necessary and post to the calendar following approval.  

The event calendar application also includes spam filtering. This shields it from spambots or automated junk submissions passing through the Web events submission form.  And just like all the other applications, the event calendar comes with several default layouts – in this case for a 30-day calendar view, a weekly view and a daily view, all with standard layouts.

Event Calendar Tips – The event calendar application layout now includes what we call conditional <divs> on the editor. These allow you to see when conditional content might show on the calendar. Take recurring events for instance. If an event is not recurring, that part of the layout would not show because it’s conditional based on whether or not there’s any content to be placed within that div. So it allows you to get a really good idea of the look and feel of the layout with and without that content.

Social Media Module

SE 2011 EP1 introduced the new Social Media modules for adding Twitter and Facebook content to SiteExecutive pages and templates (more to be added soon). The big bonus of these modules is they also let you manage social content within SiteExecutive.

Social Media Module Tips – The SiteExecutive Twitter widget gives you more control over the look and feel of Twitter content than the Twitter feed. You can customize the background color, font color and text just by using the options in the properties editor. Another cool feature of the widget is that it lets you remove any unwanted content or feeds that come through with content inappropriate for your site.

More Tips and Tricks

Yes, we’ve got more tips and tricks, as well as detailed user guides and other useful info posted on the SiteExecutive Support Center (login required). You’ll also find the SiteExecutive training calendar there.  And, if you don’t see what you’re looking for, just get in touch.

Sabrina