Challenge:		Designing a functional and attractive web site for a long-term children's study on the effects of environmental factors on child health and development. The site needed to be cost-effective, easy for study personnel to maintain, and adaptable to the changing content needs of a 20 year project.
Solution:		Commonspot, the content management system from PaperThin, was a perfect fit for the National Children's Study's needs. Its standard features and tools provided the basic functionality required by the Study, while enabling customization to create a unique appearance and added features.

Some of the highlights of the CommonSpot solution include:

1. Template capabilities
2. Meta-data and page indexing
3. Standard galleries for page construction
4. Page element management tools
5. Ability to customize

1. Templates

The most efficient way to create multiple pages is to use templates. Commonspot makes the creation of templates simple and allows users to keep a consistent style and format throughout the site. For the Study, once a given web page was satisfactorily formatted, "save as template" could be selected from the options. This automatically saved the format in the template gallery to be used in the creation of other pages. For example, using a template to create the Study Assembly Meeting pages allowed:

• Quick and easy page creation with all standard information included
• Ability to add custom information on individual pages without affecting the template
• Editing across all related pages without changing custom information by making changes at the template level
• Modification of page meta-data in one place without affecting page content

Templates became particularly useful when a few of the study group names were changed after much of the content was posted on the site. The names were edited in the template group list and the changes appeared on all the Study Assembly Meeting pages automatically.

2. Meta-data

In the simplest terms, meta-data is information about data. In this case, it is information about a page that is not necessarily displayed on the page, but rather used behind the scenes for organizational and administrative purposes. Examples of metadata that can be set for a given page include category, date of creation, and file type.

In Commonspot, this information can be used for many purposes, such as automatically sorting and listing the pages on the site in a variety of ways. For the Study, the Events content was divided into three major groupings of information: upcoming events, previous events, and a complete list of all meetings. During the creation of pages for this section, meta-data was assigned to each page designating it as belonging to one of those categories. Once the page was published, the page title showed automatically as a link on the home page, under the appropriate category.

This was particularly useful because pages could be moved from "Upcoming Events" to the "Archived Proceedings from Past Events" list by changing the meta-data in one place.

3. Galleries

To make page creation and content management even easier for the web novices who would take over maintenance of the Study's site, Commonspot offered a number of galleries:

• Layout galleries contain a set of pre-constructed page layout designs ranging in complexity so that both beginners and advanced web designers have the ability to create attractive and useful web pages. Included in this are template galleries where custom layout templates can be selected and implemented with one click.
  
• Element galleries provide the basic building blocks of a Commonspot page in one convenient place. A comprehensive list of elements exists that allows the user to choose from a variety of options, actions, functions (adding text or creating a link) and displays (bulleted list of links, or simple list) that allow even a novice to create complex pages.
  
• Page and picture galleries store pages created in Commonspot, uploaded documents and images for easy access. If the name or location of a page is forgotten, it can be found and/or linked to by visiting the gallery and selecting that page with one click of the mouse.
  

4. Element Management

Since elements are the nuts and bolts of the standard page, having the ability to modify or move them is imperative. Each element has associated editing tools that allow it to be moved, modified or deleted without affecting other elements on the page. For the Study, great use was made of the scheduled element to switch out content for Study Assembly Meetings. If the meeting had not yet taken place, the page was given meta-data saying that it was an "upcoming event", and only information on the location, registration and agenda would appear. Once the meeting had taken place, the meta-data would be switched to say it was a "past event". With this one change, the registration information would disappear and the meeting summaries would display.

Most of the content was entered using the formatted text block element. An easy-to-use rich text editor was used not only to format text, but to insert pictures, upload external documents and link to other site pages without having to use additional elements. Most of the content was copied from existing MS Word documents and pasted into the editor, allowing the site to come together quickly and with minimal editing requirements.

5. Customization

Besides having easy-to-use standard tools for page creation and editing, it was also important that the Study site have some unique functionality. The first task was to build a custom header that included the study logo on the right-hand side, randomly-selected images on the left-hand side, and the navigational tools and search function underneath.

The Study members were able to have the look and feel they wanted, including an opening page with a different layout than the rest of the site.

We also added functionality that automatically pulled group roster information from the central database maintained by the Study. This information was inserted onto the group pages using a custom ColdFusion tag, so that any changes in the database would be reflected in the roster list without affecting the other information on the page.