CASE STUDY 002
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 x Contribute 3
2005.04.01

What is unique to web design is that it is never static, that the image and content will always be in a state of change.
This is really the essence of the internet, its immediacy of information.
Of course, constant change also means constant updating of which there are two approaches.

1. We do the updating for our clients.
2. The clients do their own updating.

There are obvious plus and minuses for both directions, cost being at the root of them. Updating from our side can be done efficiently while maintaining the quality of the design. Unfortunately this is also the more costly of the two and results is a large expense to our clients. Updating from the client side lowers the cost load but may consume time that the client does not have. Our solution to these problems was to develop a Contents Management System using Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute 3. As a result, we were able to maintain the quality of design as well as provide a low-cost and time saving solution for the University of Tokyo website.

Even though the updating process is fairly straight forward using Contribute it was still necessary to educate the client so that they could use the software confidently. We created a manual on how to use it and held seminars and workshops at the university so that people could get hands-on experience with the software before we handed the work over to them. During the first few weeks of operation we also took lots of feedback from the university faculty and used it to make minor changes to the CSS and other areas so to further improve the process.

In this case we confronted a long standing issue with updating websites and developed the best solution for our client.

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

http://www.macromedia.com/jp/software/dreamweaver/

Macromedia Contribute 3

http://www.macromedia.com/jp/software/contribute/