About Site Studio

Site Studio is a powerful, flexible web development application suite that offers a comprehensive approach to designing, building, and maintaining enterprise-scale Web sites. It goes beyond conventional Web site development solutions by offering site creation and content management all in one. Everything associated with a Web site, including all site assets (such as templates, graphics, CSS files, and the like) and all site content, is stored and managed in the content server, which means that all security, revision control, workflow, and search functionality of the content server is automatically available.

Site Studio dramatically improves productivity and enables organizations to maintain accurate, timely, and current web content with consistent branding and presentation across all corporate sites. With Site Studio, you can centralize control of site architecture and presentation, while distributing content development and ongoing maintenance to business units or other teams.

Site Studio comprises three applications, which reflect three distinct users of Site Studio: designers, managers, and contributors.

The Site Studio Designer application provides the development environment in which individuals (the site designers) can create, design, and distribute the site. The designer controls the look and feel of the web pages, and images, fonts, colors, and layout of the web pages. The designer is typically a webmaster, a web developer, a site administrator, or someone in a similar position. Typically, one designer will work with multiple managers and contributors. See the Site Studio Designer Guide for more information.

The Site Studio Manager application provides a web-based site management console that can be used by one or more site managers to control the navigation structure of the Web site, including which templates to use and which content to display. The manager is often the head of a division or department. See the Site Studio Administrator and Manager Guide for more information.

The Site Studio Contributor application enables assigned individuals within an organization (the contributors) to add and update content on the Web site whenever they want using an inline editing environment that can be called directly from the Web site. Contributors are usually non-technical users and might be members of a marketing team or sales team.

The separation of Site Studio users into site designers, managers, and contributors yields numerous benefits. First, site designers do not have to be bothered if content or navigation on the site must be updated. They use Site Studio Designer to create reusable site assets (templates, fragments, and the like) and combine these assets to build a site, and then they are done.

Second, site managers can add entirely new sections to the Web site without needing the design team. They can simply reuse the assets that the designer created and then add new sections to the Web site or rearrange existing ones.

Finally, contributors do not have to know HTML at all to create highly complex and attractive web pages. They can add content with native applications such as Microsoft Word or with Site Studio Contributor. The latter is a web-based HTML editor that gives contributors an advanced editing environment for creating and updating content. The site designer can still enforce a consistent look and feel by limiting what editing options are available; for example, allowing site contributors to select only from a list of approved fonts, colors, and styles.

In addition to these three Site Studio roles, there may also be separate site administrators, who could take on responsibility for assigning web addresses to the site, backing up the site, replicating the site, and so on. All these administrative tasks are performed on the content server.

Note: One person may have multiple roles, depending on the organization's size and structure.