Your standard site navigation structure is great for organising your website's pages in a way that makes sense to you and your organisation from a general view. However, when somebody arrives at your website, more often than not they are on a specific mission, a mission that is unlikely to be an exact match for your site's structure. How do you then guide this person into relevant areas of your website, areas on larger sites that may sometimes be in a completely different section?

Tagging, A Formal Introduction

Tags are short keywords that define what your content is all about. They can help form organic navigation paths which can be especially useful for when there are multiple distinct reasons for users to be visiting a larger website.

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.
-Wikipedia

Tags and tagging should be understood by most web-savvy users. The concept of tagging and tag navigation is not new, having already been successfully implemented on many websites, Siteflex and beyond.

Tagging, with Siteflex

Siteflex currently allows you to tag your Pages, with plans for our tagging system to expand to all corners of Siteflex; Products, News, Events, Photo Galleries and more.

It is in your hands to develop your own site's internal tagging dialogue. Our tagging system allows you to quickly select from any tags you may have already used to try and keep things nice and consistent, and hence relevant.

Tagging, the nitty gritty

For advanced users, the related content codes for showing a list of tagged items are:

• tagged
  tagged=num, tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5, opt
  
  List items that have been tagged with a set of up to 5 tags (ie. items tagged "food" and "italian")
   
• tagged_all
  tagged_all=num, tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5, opt
  
  List all items that have been tagged with any of up to 5 tags (ie. items tagged "food" or "italian").
  
  
• random_tagged
  random_tagged_all
  
  These are the same as tagged and tagged_all above, but random.

Advanced users are also able to list the most popular tags themselves:

• popular_tags
  popular_tags=num
  
  List the most popular tags on the site, by popularity. (ie. the tags that have been applied to the most amount of content)
  
• tag_cloud
  tag_cloud=num
  
  List the most popular tags on the site, alphabetically and with special font size styling applied to make the more popular tags appear larger or other customisations.
  
  

Interested in getting tagging onto your Siteflex website? Get in contact and ask us.

Automatic Image Captioning with SiteflexA great little feature of Siteflex, currently in action on a few sites, but many may not be aware of, is Automatic Image Captioning.

Quite simply, this feature takes additional work out of the equation when dealing with image captions by hijacking the image's Alternative text value.

Alternative text is an already important field to fill out due to accessibility concerns as well as for search-engine optimisation (SEO) purposes. Although it's main purpose is being to describe the image in succinct, neutral terms, often the reality becomes that this same text would also be useful as an image caption.

Auto image captioning allows you to put in the same amount of effort and receive double the benefit. Great!

All Siteflex sites using the new Siteflex Editor (yes, still in Beta) now have the ability to easily select any individual image as one to Auto Caption.

But you can roll it your way too. Would you like every image on your site to automatically caption with no effort by you? You can. This approach might be especially useful for new websites where a fresh approach to content is neccessary and captions can be thought through from the get-go.

Interested in having Auto image captioning enabled on your site by default? Get in contact and let us know.