From the Editor's Desk
Here it is September already! I can hardly believe it, the time has just flown by this summer here at the Village. Perhaps because we here in Ontario, Canada, particularly southern Ontario, have had such a wet and cold summer, it has been all too easy to put in long hours and hard work getting the Village ready for real use. BTW, did I mention that the Village is now ready and is, in fact, in use? I am truly amazed at just what the Village has become, in reading over much of the submitted content this month I have come to learn much more about just what the Village can do ... sometimes I think there is nothing you can't accomplish on the Village! After last month's feature on our member company, The RANT 
Group, I was wondering how much of that was done and now I think I know.
I think I know because of all the articles this month, on a thing called a MENU, other things called TABS, SEO, autocomplete, Input Format, and more. It really is fascinating, but I sure am glad that most of this is automatic 
The truth is I actually like working on the Village, I'm not sure it started out as intuitive but with the recent changes I think it really is very easy to use to create some very good looking pages with lots of information for people to read.
GATE Village
The breadth and depth of GATE
Village functionality is unparralleled for any ECM or WCM platform ... No Compromises indeed! Blending together in perfect harmony both the technical goo to ensure that Village functions for the members AND for the visitors that the SEO technology is sure to bring them. As of August 31, 2009, a search for "GATE Village" sees http://www.gatevillage.net appear as the fourth link on the first page ... not bad for a site that didn't publish content 3 months ago! That same technology is now hard at work putting RANT Tattoo, RANT Gallery, and RANT Computing on the search map.
The best part of that story is how automatic it all is, each content type in GATE Village is assigned reasonable default values for inclusion in the "sitemap.xml" ... which is actually so big it is in two files now: sitemap0.xml and sitemap1.xml. The map is maintained as tables within our database and automatically submitted to Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and ASK with new search engines being added as they become available.
With SEO Friend in place with public content types, the Village prompts content creators to provide all the information required for proper submission to search engines. You don't have to know what to do, you just have to follow simple instructions on an easy to use interface. None of this is rocket science, but there are a lot of important steps that if they aren't taken then all the hard work in content creation is almost for naught. There are many folks who DO understand SEO and so it is vital that your web site does as well or you will be lost in the search clutter.
But if all the Village did was to prompt you to do work, it would be little better than a note pad. GATE Village provides a great deal of automated help that like page title creation, automatic meta-tag inclusion, sitemap inclusion, copyright statements, URL rewriting (to ensure no duplicates) and a few other boring behind the sceans technology doing the work so you don't have to.
Work like Revision Control making sure you know who did what and when; keep a record or just keep safe. It isn't on all the time, that would be wasteful, but it is on the important content and can be controlled as to whom can circumvent it or not.
Beauty can't be sacrificed!
Too often ECM platforms provide clunky, hard to understand and use interfaces that are nearly impossible to change. That's no way to do business!
Beauty
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but when it comes to the Internet, there are certain standards that must be met for your Authentic Voice to ring loud. Certain tools are expected and required and others are really nice to have. GATE Village provides all of the tools you could want to personalize your site and bring the beauty forward for all to see.
- Themes -- GATE Village supports a growing number of distinctive themes that many Village Roles can choose from. One good example of a theme well on it's way to being complete is RANT Computing
- CSS -- Cascading Style Sheets are supported to either augment the Village tools, features and functions or to take over the entire page as many of our Business Account holders have done
- Inline <style> statements -- our WYSIWYG editors make content creation easy and yet very complete. The more you know or learn the more functionality we have to provide.
MENU
It is pretty difficult to create a web site that people want to visit without providing a lot of assistance in the form of navigational links into your
site. Whether the standard "About Us", "Contact", and "Privacy Policy" or product lists, customer support links, shopping cart or any other area, MENUs help to guide your audience to where both you and they want to be.
GATE Village provides a large number of options for creating MENUs into the Village content and we've created a page that shows 11 separate examples of the GATE Village Services menu. That is really only a taste, the sky and your imagination are the only limits to making and using MENUs in GATE Village.
TAB
MENUs may well lead you to content but the content are most often displayed using TABs.
While it may not be obvious, one of the most difficult things to do in web design is to provide the content in a way that keeps the viewer engaged and reasonably happy to be reading your web page. Every time a user clicks on a URL you have the potential to lose them to the larger Internet. If you can keep them there and bring the content to them then you have a better chance to keep them around. This is especially true if you have a lot of content to share.
THe link above provides a good overview of some of the possibilities of for tabbed content available in GATE Village. We do want to warn you, however, that is a ridiculously large page and it may take some time to load.
Brains
Beauty alone is just not sufficient to promote yourself or your business on the Internet, if you don't do things in just the right way, you will find it difficult to get and stay in the search engines. Here is just a small snippet of some of the smart things that GATE Village brings to our members...
That'll about wrap it up for this month, but we did want to remind you of a few things this edition highlighted:
- Beauty -- We provide the best in online tools to allow you to bring whatever aesthetics you please to your site, including themes, and a Personalized Presence
- Brains -- We do the important, technical (boring) bits that you didn't even know you needed to do.
- Form - We talked about MENUs and the various ways that GATE Village offers you to display the navigational links through your piece of the Village
- Function - We talked about TABS and the various ways that GATE Village can produce tabbed content automatically.
- Trust -- And of course everything we do is guided by the GATE Village Trust System</ol>
We'll end this by pointing out that even with all this technology in place, this page and most others are CSS 2.1 validated ...follow the link below to verify.
