Garinet has assisted Murphy Valentine from GarifunaLink.com to automate the news section of his website.
Murphy Valentine is the host of the 10 year old New York television program, Centro America Show. GarifunaLink.com is one of Murphy’s latest projects to keep the Garifuna Community informed on the latest and greatest from New York.
Updating the content for GarifunaLink.com was a very tedious process. Murphy constantly receives news stories from Honduras from individuals such as Lic. Celeo Alvarez, and Wendy Griffin, for posting on the website. To add one single news stpry, Murphy would have to perform the following steps:
1. Open up a website application editor, such as Microsoft Front Page or Macromedia Dream weaver.
2. Open the front page of the website on his local computer.
3. Manually update the HTML code of the front page to accommodate for the new news summary content.
4. Create a new page for the full body of the news content, thus every news story required at least long hours of editing two pages.
5. Link the summary of the front page to the newly created full story web page.
6. Manually create a small photo or thumbnail in a graphic editor program such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks.
7. Add the small image to the summary of the story in the front page.
8. Add the large image to the body of the story on the new page.
9. Upload the front page file with the updated news summary to the web server using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) application, such as WS-FTP or Cute FTP.
10. Upload the new full story page to the web server for readers to access the information over the Internet.
Since most of the software mentioned above are stand alone applications that run on a single computer per license, Murphy would be required to be at his home/office computer to perform any changes to the website.
To make matters worst, the amount of news stories that Murphy could put in the front page at any given time was very limited. Having 10 news stories would mean the creation of 20 links or more and the constant pain of linking pages back and forth.
Through GariDigital.com, Garinet Global, has provided Murphy, with a News Automated web application that allows him to update the news stories from anywhere at any given time in far fewer steps, without touching any messy HTML code. This News Automated application allows Murphy to focus on what he does best, which is to inform the community.
The News Automated web application offers some of the following benefits:
1. Allows Murphy to logon to an administrative password-protected interface to manage all the news, whether 10 news stories or literally thousands of news stories.
2. Allows for news stories to be copied and pasted directly through a web browser, such as Internet Explorer, eliminating the need of expensive software and the huge learning curve that comes with them. Thus Murphy can be anywhere in the world and as long as he has access to the Internet he can quickly paste the news story directly from his email into the News Automated system for instant publication.
3. Allows the option to un-publish a story if the need arises, without touching any code at all.
4. Select how many stories to display in the front page, by simply changing the settings.
5. Allows news stories to be published in the future. Thus if Murphy needs to go on vacation, he can load news stories on the system and instruct it to publish them at a future date, so the website is always updated.
6. Allows the delegation of the news updates to any non-techie staff member.
7. Automatically creates the small news photo out of a single large photo, thus saving time.
8. Automatically displays the news title, summary and small photo in the front page, linking to the full story.
9. Automatically attaches the large news photo to the body of the story.
10. Eliminates the need of uploading via FTP.
The time-saving features the News Automated system brings Murphy, will certainly allow him to publish more news stories in a short amount of time, thus keeping the site fresh to keep visitors coming back for more.
To see how, Garinet Global, can assist you in automating your website, visit:
http://www.GariDigital.com
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