As a regular observer and sometimes participant in group discussions on the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Communications listserv, I get an insider’s view of the challenges facing prospective clients. A recent post from a PR director at a college I won’t name, was seeking advice about the merits of using WordPress for managing his institution’s online newsroom. The post generated a number of replies from group members, most of which – well all except mine – were encouraging....Click here to read more.

Last Thursday, Stephen Powers, a WCM analyst with Forrester published a blog titled, “Splintering Into Mobile.” The blog highlights several problems facing marketers and website owners who are increasingly challenged to deliver content in formats appropriate for a growing array of mobile devices – this is the splintering.

Based on feedback from Forrester clients, Powers identified three main concerns associated with managing multiple online experiences:

1.      Number of devices. Most companies simply don’t have the resources to manage device-specific content and presentation for a multitude of devices.

2.      Production efficiencies. Managing mobile experiences alongside traditional websites is currently a major pain point for those who are trying to figure out the right mix of asset re-use and device-specific content while maintaining consistency.

3.      Globalization and localization. Some companies have expressed interest for tailoring content for a select number of devices that their customers use most often.

If you read the entire blog you’ll find a reference to other Forrester research on this topic and insights into the ways some CMS vendors are addressing these challenges. For now, I’ll cut to the chase and explain how Systems Alliance can help you manage multiple online experiences and deliver mobile-friendly Web content with SiteExecutive – and invite you to a webinar we’re hosting on this topic on April 28, 2011.

One of the important topics we’ll explore in the Webinar and mention here is the importance of administrative simplification. Managing and optimizing a website, even when you have a team of people dedicated to the task, is a lot of work. A Web content management system like SiteExecutive supports administrative simplification by letting you distribute responsibility for content creation, design, administration to people who are best suited for the task. For example, subject matter experts who may know nothing about HTML or CSS should be solely responsible for creating, managing and publishing what I’ll call “brand-aligned” Web content on your Website.

Brand-aligned content meets your organization’s quality, compliance and format guidelines. And, it also meets the needs of your site visitors – thus, it should be compelling and accessible by all visitors, including the disabled and people visiting your site on mobile devices…

Taking this a step further, your CMS should also play a role in managing multiple (mobile) online experiences. With SiteExecutive, content authors create content once and the software automatically determines how that content should render (display) based on the visitor’s browser profile. SiteExecutive accomplishes this by detecting the visitor’s browser type and swapping the template and associated CSS for the content so it displays properly on the mobile device. This functionality also works with video content, swapping HTML5 compatible content for Flash video when serving iPhones and other related devices.

Executing the template swapping process requires development of mobile-friendly templates and related CSS. For many sites this can be accomplished in a matter of hours. The success of this approach is dependent on the structure of your site’s content. It also works best for sites where the over-arching desire is to make the whole site mobile friendly. And, this is the crux of our approach.

You need a full-blown mobile site – now!

While you may need an iPhone, Android or Blackberry “app” to deliver some specific functionality for your customers/visitors, ultimately, what you really need – and this will become increasingly true as mobile devices proliferate – is a full-blown mobile site, because any and all of your content is fair game for mobile visitors. And, you shouldn’t have to think about splintering your content OR content creation process to make this happen!

Innovation is important to success.  Sometimes we take on risk because we hope we’ll find a new and useful outcome.  Enter test automation.  There are many pundits who say test automation is the be all end all for a successful, efficient testing process.  While others claim it has limited value and will never replace manual functional testing (these and other experts also raise concerns about its ROI, especially the cost of maintainability as tests evolve along with product maturation). 

The SiteExecutive product team has ventured into the world of automated testing to:

• Accelerate  product development
• Improve build quality for each SiteExecutive release

Although it’s early in the process – we’re nearing the end of phase I of an ongoing program – we’ve had some meaningful results worth sharing.

Testing Framework and Focus

Our objectives for phase I included selecting a testing framework, writing test scripts for our high-priority functions, and evaluating and enforcing Web standards. We quickly settled on Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org/) as our testing platform.  There were two important reasons for this:

• Low (no) Cost – Selenium is open source, with a large community and is widely adopted by major software companies (Google, Mozilla, Oracle to name a few)
• Cross browser support – Selenium works with many different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, WebKit (Chrome & Safari)

At this point, it’s worth noting that even though it has a large and influential user community, working with an open source tool like Selenium is still best for people who are comfortable with a higher level of uncertainty, willing to be self-sufficient and motivated by an opportunity to advance the efforts of the larger community – all of which I fully embrace.

Testing Automation

Once a tool was selected, we mapped out our strategy for tackling the high-priority tests which account for about 20% of our manual functional tests.  Next, we identified reusable tasks that we could generalize into global functions. At this point we realized we could not rely on the out-of-the-box Selenium commands and needed to write code to test code. This meant extending the Selenium API… No problem.

Selenium injects itself into a browser through JavaScript and simulates real human interactions like clicking, typing, etc. – though not always exactly as we would like. One example: by issuing a click command, Selenium didn't check to see if what a prototypical user was clicking really existed.  The workaround we developed has the click command wait for the element being clicked to exist before we issue the next click command.

Web Standards

Web standards presented us with another big challenge.  A Web content management system like SiteExecutive should provide the user with easy-to-use tools for building and maintaining websites and enforcing (ensuring) compliance with Web standards.  Thus, we have a critical need for inspecting HTML for both the expected layout and compliance with the W3C schools DOCTYPE specifications. Before we automated this process, a tester first had to visit http://validator.w3.org to validate the HTML and report if it was not compliant.  The process of complying with the WCAG 2.0 specification for Web accessibility presented a similar challenge. 

As mentioned previously, when people invest in a tool like SiteExecutive they expect it will create websites that comply with Web standards. Likewise, when a new version of Firefox or Internet Explore gets released there is a similar expectation – SiteExecutive will continue to function in the latest release regardless of how much code Mozilla or Microsoft changes. Fortunately, our use of automated testing helps make this happen – and, it also leads to higher quality SiteExecutive releases.

Man vs. Machine

At the end of phase I, we’ve developed automated tests for a number of high-priority functions.  Previously these tests took a human tester four to five days to complete for each platform – they now run in a few hours. Beyond the ROI associated with saving or redirecting manpower, automating SiteExecutive testing has other tangible benefits. For example, as humans, we’re wired to make mistakes.  With automated testing the details of a testing regimen are enforced and the human problem of overlooking problem issues is eliminated. 

Our exploration of automated testing has also given us new skills we can share with clients. Think of it as “Testing as a Service”. This would be especially applicable for clients who have developed or are developing custom modules and applications or otherwise extending SiteExecutive functionality in some unique way. Though they might think about testing their home-grown code during its initial development, they face the same problems Systems Alliance faces whenever third-party vendors release updates to browsers and or other applications in the SiteExecutive stack.

Want to learn more about automated testing – or if you’ve got some custom SiteExecutive code to test, get in touch.

Unless you've always used a Mac or are new to Windows PCs, you've probably experienced the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) more than once. Though annoying (and sometimes extremely aggravating), the BSoD is usually resolved by restarting Windows. Yesterday, thanks to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, I learned about the Web analog to the BSoD – it's called the White Screen of Death (WSoD).

Unlike the good old BSoD, the WSoD is an open-source affliction, related to PHP programming errors. What makes the WSoD worthy of a mention in the SF Chronicle (and this blog), is the fact it directly effects WordPress – a widely deployed blog engine and light-weight CMS – and Drupal, an equally popular open-source CMS, which competes with SiteExecutive.

When the WSoD occurs, afflicted sites render blank pages. And if I understood the Chronicle article correctly, the problem can also impact the Admin pages in WordPress. Thus, your site visitors get blank pages with NO content and you cannot administer your blog or Website – NICE!

Both WordPress and Drupal are know for making content management easy for end users. This certainly contributes to their popularity, which is also fueled by their cost – they're free (sort of). In actuality, for most organizations, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for these applications is far from free. Factor in the costs (whether you're paying for internal colleagues or third-party consultants) of support, development, add-on modules, integration and downtime and the numbers can add up.

So, if you're considering an open source CMS, please take into account the time, effort and expertise required for managing open source code – and be prepared to contend with the business impact of WSoD.

Alternatively, if you are looking for an affordable, reliable (and easy to use) CMS on which you can dependably run your organization's Website, we suggest SiteExecutive – especially if you choose our SaaS offering, which gets you a fully supported, hosted CMS and Website, with SLAs for performance and availability.

Congratulations to Art Lang, Ernest Bourne and the rest of  the Web team at the Salt Lake County Library on the launch of the library's revamped Website. The site serves as an online branch, giving visitors access to virtually all library services, from research to book requests and more. Making these services available through SiteExecutive required some custom development and integration with existing library systems. Fortunately, the SiteExecutive API is easily tapped for custom development, especially by Web developers completing SiteExecutive API and Developer Training, which Art and Ernest did last fall.