Personas

Tentacle has been built to reduce the level of knowledge needed to run and maintain a web site.

Designing a CMS for various types of users is challenging. Never knowing how something will be used and knowing it will never be used as intended doesn’t help. But with so many different types of users keeping things simple and straightforward is tricky.

The Site Owner This is the person who is in charge of the site. They will have a list of requirements and be responsible for making decisions.

They probably have very little to do in the actual site site its self and might have little or no technical knowledge.

The Administrator This person is usually be in charge of approving and potentially moderating feedback. They will need some basic knowledge of the web and how it works but they should not need to see or edit and HTML.

They will from time to time write content for the web but will likely overlook the Writers.

The Writer This person will be using the site the most and will have to accomplish goals given to them by their superiors. They might have to handle things like adding Job postings, Documents or creating forms for feedback.

The Designer It will be the designers job to work with the site owner and administrator to come up with a solution to their needs. The design should be transferrable to the web and have very few if any limitation imposed on them by the CMS or Development.

The Developer Developers are usually brought in throughout planning meetings and will consult as to the plausibility of feature requests. In most cases anything is possible with any CMS but the tradeoffs come with extra development time or complicating the UX for the primary users.

The Visitor As a Visitor viewing your site, they are hopefully a returning visitor but they have searched the internet for your site. To your visitors the usability of your website will lead to a positive user experience.

Needless to say, some of these rolls will over lap but others like the Developer is probably not going to overlap with the writer. It would be best to avoid overlapping each rolls domain.

Enter Tentacle!

By focusing on the user we are able to refine the processes for every one. By building Tentacle on a light weight flexible framework we are not imposing strickt rules on you. By working with and providing the tools you need we hope you can accomplish more in less time.

Writers will be able to add custom data just as easily as filling out a web form with contextual titles, a full WYSIWYG editor, and Validation.

Designers can stick to what they know and use HTML, CSS, PHP, JS to do their bidding.

With an approval process in place content can be added as a draft, approved and versioned. We went another step in that you can modify approved content without publishing immediately publishing the changes to the live site.