123Live - Website Design & Content Management - Call 0845 685 0031

Based in Hampshire, serving the UK - 0845 685 0031 

Meet the demand for robust, low maintenance CMS websites by developing with the world's first fully Ajax driven CMS.

CMS Developers

A brief overview of the Ajax driven CMS

123Live is a Website Content Management System (CMS) that is now available to approved website developers. Development started in 2001 and the first customer was signed up in May 2002. We now have a few hundred customers, most of whom have been serviced directly by 123Live. Having proven the CMS in the market place we are now focusing on working through existing website developers.

The Content Management System is fully Ajax driven with a drag and drop, WYSIWYG user interface that is easy to learn and responds at desktop speed.

The software is hosted on our Windows servers which means that you do not have any maintenance issues to deal with. The software is not available for you to install on your own servers. The CMS is not Open Source and is protected by copyright. This means that you cannot tweak the code of the CMS, but you will find that the CMS is very flexible, and imposes very few restrictions.

The CMS publishes 'flat HTML' websites via FTP, rather than creating each page on the fly. This means that the websites developed using the 123Live CMS are fast loading and search engine friendly. The CMS can publish to your own web servers if you prefer to do your own web hosting and allows you to incorporate your own server side functionality into content managed websites.

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Ideal clients for the CMS

There are many content management systems on the market, most of which are open source and require the overhead of maintaining the software and application servers.

Of the hosted content management systems on the market, most are geared to 'enterprise' clients that need to cater for multiple simultaneous contributors, workflow control, audit trails, user permissions and so on.

The 123Live CMS is designed for 'marketing websites' with up to a few hundred pages. It is 'single seat' software delivered via a browser. It can be used for e-commerce websites, but it does not feature a product database which means that it offers a very flexible solution for up to a few tens of products, but is not well suited to websites with hundreds of products where search, sort and filtering are required.

The ideal client cannot be determined by the size of business. Our direct clients range from one man bands to SME's up to international PLC's. The criteria for a good match is that there is a clear need for a non-technical person to be able to frequently update the website with minimal training and support. 

Building websites using the CMS

All templates are built using your own HTML. No part of any template is 'out of bounds' to the developer. It is possible to create templates that allow users to enter data that will be used in scripts both on the client and server side.

A stylesheet editor is included with quick preview function. In the text editor, users are presented with a list of heading styles, these are regular HTML H tags redefined by you in the stylesheet. We have found that this is a much better approach than allowing users to create their own (usually horrific) styles.

Page templates

Most of the websites we have created have a single page template, but the CMS allows you to create as many page templates as you wish. When a user adds a page they are presented with a list of templates to choose from.

Special tags are placed in the page templates for: the main menu; submenu; 'you are here'; main user content; file selection; image selection; link to another page; and plain or HTML text.

Menu templates

Again, these are composed of your own HTML and CSS. Special tags are used to merge: the menu text; title (hover) text; and the filename (.htm). The user can add pages and drag them around the menus, without needing to be aware of the filename of the published page.

We do not encourage or support fly-out menus. Submenus are static menus that appear on every page within a main menu item.

A path (you are here) facility is also available.

Section templates

The main user content is a rectangular element that is composed of an unlimited number of sections. Sections can be dragged up or down the page within the main user content area. Section templates are HTML snippets that provide layout and styling for content that requires a particular layout, such as news items, galleries, case studies etc.. Section templates are comprised of your own HTML/CSS and can include: file selection; image selection; link to another page; and plain or HTML text.
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