vase with tulips

Features

Here are just some of the features in ContentSpot. It's important to understand that you can "pick and mix" these various modules - you don't have to have all of them.

If you think there's a glaring omission, please don't hesitate to get in touch and let us know.

Configuration Screen

Events Calendar

Printing the page

Menus

You can add and amend top level menus and submenus (if you have submenus - it's not compulsory! As you can see, we don't have any submenus on this site).

Guestbook

The guestbook facility (coming soon) e-mails you when there are new submissions, and you can then go to the Administration System to review them, and publish them if you wish (they are not published on the site on submission, but only upon approval). We requre guest book submitters to provide a valid e-mail address, but we never display this on the public site.

Gallery

Images for the gallery can be catgorised, and we automatically generate thumbnails and large images on the fly, together with optimising them for web. The submission form allows for the entry of a headline and a description for each image.

Subscribers

We provide the faciity for visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, which you can use to mail your customers via the Administration System. The subscription mechanism is a full opt in/opt out system, to prevent people maliciously adding or removing people from the list. We also provide you with a basic privacy policy, which you can edit to suit yourself.

Links

The system allows full categorised external link maintenance.

RSS feed

We will shortly be offering an RSS / XML facility for news items, allowing your visitors to keep up to date via a feed reader. Newsgator is an RSS plugin for Outlook, or if you're a Mac user, try NetNewsWire.

Blog

We will shortly have a web log facility available. A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web - see LiveJournal, for example. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated every few days, or even more frequently. Blog postings are usually arranged in date order, with the most recent entries first. It can be a great way to keep your readers in touch.

Configuration Screen

This allows you to enter some basic information, and determine whether you want it to be displayed on the site (e.g. do you wish to display VAT or company registration number). It also allows you to choose some parameters for e-mails from the site contact form.

Site Search

We will be shortly be offering a full site search facility

Web Stats

We will be offering a full web log analysis facility, using Urchin software. Urchin has a friendly interface, and offers comprehensive log analysis, allowing you to easily see what your site visitors are doing. It is used by such organisations as NASA and NBC.

Events Calendar

This is coming soon, and will allow you to enter events, both one off and recurring, and have them displayed in a simple calendar format on the site.

Pricelist

We offer the facility to enter your prices via a web form. Using a separate data table for prices means that it is much easier to keep them up to date, and the formatting can be more easily controlled, thus making it easy for the web visitor to read them.

News

You can keep your visitors up-to-date with what's going on with regular bulletins. You can choose how news items are displayed; for example headlines, with or without the first paragraph or so of the text, with links to pages showing the full articles. We will be adding an RSS feed and a facility to send new news articles to members of a mailing list soon.

Lists feature

many web sites need "lists" of things. This one is no different; we have lists of FAQs, of features, and will shortly need a list of clients. So we have given ContentSpot a basic List feature - you can define your own lists, and add content to them.

Printing the page

we supply as part of the package a print stylesheet - while this may well be Yet More Jargon, what it means is that, when someone wants to print a page from your site, they will get the content, and your logo - not menus and other stuff that really isn't needed on the printed page. And kinder to the environment too!