Admin View
The Admin view is how people managing the content see the site. However, this is not
necessarily how the user sees the site—from a display perspective as well as the
structuring of information. As mentioned earlier, a user view is best represented by a
sitemap; for the Admin view we found the tree structure to work well. The Admin view is
about where to add, edit, and delete content. It's like a file server where the content is
organized in a logical manner for easy access. How that content is viewed by the user is a
different thing altogether. The purpose of the Admin view is to make things easier for the
people creating and managing the content. The Admin view became a working area, a
repository of information that needed to be structured appropriately.
As content entered in one area was to appear in other areas, we initially proposed that the
admin section be structured according to the content types. Thus when logging into the
admin section, rather than getting a list of sections as defined in the user view, we
proposed providing a list of content types:
Content Type Appears In
Publications Sustainable Products
Sustainable Buildings
Life Cycle Assessment
Publications
Projects Sustainable Products
Sustainable Buildings
Life Cycle Assessment
Training Sustainable Products
Sustainable Buildings
Life Cycle Assessment
Training
Although on the surface this made sense to both us and the client, the implementation did
not prove to be intuitive from a usability perspective. The end decision was to implement
a hybrid approach. We listed the main sections as per the user view, also listing content
types that didn't have their own dedicated section, for example, Links.
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The admin page would contain the following sections:
• Sustainable Products
• Sustainable Buildings
• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
• Training
• Research & Consulting
• Publications
• Links
• News
• Misc
Most of these sections worked in a straightforward manner: you simply clicked on the
section and added content. Where content should appear was defined within the system,
so the administrator didn't have to worry about adding the content in more than one place.
The exceptions to this were Links and Misc.