ExSite > About ExSite > Screenshots

Screenshot Tour

This page shows images of typical screens that the administrator would see during routine maintenance of their web site.

Every ExSite-based website has a "front-end" (which the public sees), and a "back-end" (which the administrators see).  ExSite features can be pushed through to the front-end if it is desirable that they be accessed through the regular web site, or they can be restricted to the back-end if it is desirable that they have very limited access.

All screenshots below are taken from the administrator views of ExSite Webware.  To see the actual website being managed in these screens, please visit http://ExsiteWebware.com/Demo. 



Web Top→

The back-end begins with the ExSite "webtop", which resembles a computer desktop in that is has a bunch of "launcher" icons for various site functions.

Your web site may include numerous web applications, and it is easy to add more or create your own.  Some of these applications control basic features such as web page editing, whereas other control specific subsystems like Search, Membership, Blogs, or E-commerce.  Click on a web application icon to launch its administrator control-panel.



 

←My Website

The My Website control panel is used for elementary web page editing.  It provides a simplified set of features for easy creation and editing of pages.  This is essentially a simplified CMS interface for non-technical users who do not wish to tinker with HTML or CSS.

Editing a web page with the My Website CMS plug-in is simple—the editor appears right inside the web page itself, and you use it just like any word processing application.  You can easily edit text, create hyperlinks, add images, and insert other web applications to perform special site functions.  Those web applications will appear as icons inside the editor, but the icons will expand to fully-functional web content when viewed on the final page.

Whenever you edit a page, your previous revisions are not discarded, but are archived indefinitely.  That means you can roll back to earlier versions any time you choose.

Also, changes are not visible to the public until you choose to publish them.  That means you can freely update your content without obsessively proofreading it every time.  You can also assign editing duties to other staff, and only choose to "go live" once you approve of their changes.

 
 

Website Manager→

The Website Manager is a more advanced content management tool.  It gives you full access to all of your content, including revision histories, and source-level editing of HTML and CSS.  You can also work with complex layouts, and configure specialized templates.  This tool is often used by graphic designers to import and modify their designs and layouts, and apply them to special pages and subsections of your sites.

The Website Manager also gives you access to content-sharing features, which allow you to make shareable graphic designs, shareable libraries of common images, and preconfigured site maps.  These features are useful in environments where you want to rapidly create new sites, such as when private-branding a web-based service.		 


 

←Photo Albums

The PhotoAlbum plug-in lets you manage libraries of images, including scaling, thumbnailing, and adding captions.

The images you manage with the PhotoAlbum can be displayed using a variety of album viewers, including the SlideShow, Gallery, and StripGallery plug-ins.  Or, you can manually insert them into pages in whatever layout you feel is appropriate.

For example, this page that you are reading includes a number of images from a library called "screenshots", which have been manually laid out to fit with these paragraphs.

At right is a screenshot of a plug-in album viewer (the Gallery plug-in), which presents an entire album as a clickable thumbnail gallery.

 


Other plug-ins work in a similar fashion.  You work with your data using a control panel invoked from the web-top (above), and then you embed the plug-in into any page you like.  The plug-in manages all aspects of formatting your data for presentation, and handling the input of the user, whether it be simple mouse-clicks, or data collection through forms.