carolgilbert.com 

About this website

Who did this?

Marconi Sailing Club's website has been developed using an innovative new content management system called Cobra-cms.  The content was created by club members although we had some professional help in coming up with the look and feel - Ed Texier at www.herringbone.co.uk helped us create a contemporary yet useable look for the web-site.

Glenn, Susan and Lawrence at BrokerNet (www.cobra-cms.com) (who designed and created the Cobra system) helped us migrate the site content from our old site to the new one - and they created Cobra in the first place - our thanks to them for all their patient help and expertise.

Finally Carol & John, our webmasters, who week-in, week-out give up time to keep the site up to date and ensures that it runs smoothly

Key features of the site:

• The ability for non-programmers such as ourselves to create, amend and delete content without having to resort to writing specialist computer-code.  Anyone who can use windows and a word-processor can create web pages on this site.  In practical terms this allows our commodore, fleet captains and bosuns to communicate quickly with club members through the site without having to involve our webmaster.  We don't need a special programme to do all this either - it all happens in a browser!
• We have pages on the site that only club members can see.  This allows us to make information available to club members via the site that non-members wouldn't be interested in.
• We can quickly publish pictures of events - again without involving programmers
• The site has been designed with accessibility in mind - it adheres to the Web Content Accessibility guidelines and will work in almost any browser - try it on your mobile phone even!

About Cobra-cms

This website was developed by Marconi Sailing Club using the Cobra content management system from BrokerNet.  Cobra is written using Microsoft ASP.NET retrieving information from a back-end SQL database. For obvious security reasons, we cannot give details of the underlying database, although the code will run on any platform.

The important features of Cobra include:

• Content management using ASP.NET - one of the most difficult parts of creating a website is managing the content that forms the various elements on any page. This site renders separate parts of the page from various source files, for instance this body text and the navigation bar. Creating code like this enables changes to be made in one place only, which updates the entire site and vastly simplifies maintenence.
• Integrated Security - great design emphasis has been placed on site and data security (this isn't a challenge!).
• Modular design - the underlying code is highly modular which facilitates development and maintenance. This includes client-side JavaScript code.
• Integrated workflow - to manage the web publication cycle.
• Highly generic code - the majority of the HTML code will work on the widest possible range of browsers.

For more information, please visit www.Cobra-cms.com.