quality control

big site - multiple editors

[benihana]

we have a large network of sites with a range of content editors with varying degrees of (html + css) ability.

increasingly we are finding lots of examples of bad preactice being posted by some editors; e.g. 500kb .png files resized in the html, multiple nested font tags etc etc

with so many pages being posted and amended everyday, quality control is difficult, and often people dont know they are doing anything wrong.

im wondering what other people do in similar situations to maintain good practices across sites with so many contributors? manually checking all pages on a regular basis is out of the question.

cheers
ben

[Voltec]

How about putting out a general checklist? You can preface it by what commonality you would expect from them (using your header and footer, this CSS with ZERO font tags used - attach a primer on how to use the CSS SPAN tag to use the different fonts you have setup). The more you put together a common header and footer along with a complete CSS and if you don't allow any FONT tags to be used, you are at least controlling the 'look and feel'. Now, on this checklist, have them run the content through a spell check in Word, or something similar, specify the max size (both width and height max's as well as bytes) and any other formatting that you want.

If you don't give them a standard, they can't keep to it. If you carefully spell out what you want and expect from them, their life becomes much easier. If you find that you still have problems with something you didn't spell out clearly, add it and resend it to your editors.

Hope this helps,
Matt

[henry0]

Voltec is on the right track
I had a similar situation and as a little tweak to Voltec suggestions
I first before going in edit mode offer
a manual and a demo
plus my editor is divided in content sections
and again spell out what is acceptable per segment

img: you can even go one step further allow resizing and uploading before resizing only up to for example: 45K

[benihana]

thanks guys - these are some good points.

weve already started some training workshops on things like basic css, image optimisation etc etc, and hopefully this will help in the long run.

im wondering if any one has used any technological methods, e.g. scripts that examine images dimension/file size etc?

ben

[henry0]

Well this should be a basic editor features
is your editor "homemade" or a purchased one?
do you ref to a "WYSIWYG" editor? or a simple content editor?

as I mentioned earlier I use a new instance of the editor object per segment
as a direct result
my editor is then customized one segment at a time