A key consideration in the design of Clubessential's Axis product was the "Division of Labor".  Rather than building a product that could do everything but fit the needs of no one, Clubessential chose to build five sets of tools, each designed for use by one of these groups:

• Club Members
• Club Administrators
• Clubessential's Support Staff
• The Studio Design Group
• Clubessential's Programming Staff

Club Members need to interact with the website when making reservations, updating addresses, answering polling questions, etc.  Clubessential builds simple, intuitive interfaces for members, under the assumption that they have had no training and probably have little technical background.

Club Administrators need simple easy to use tools to keep the cultural content of the website fresh.  The key to designing tools for club administrators is the assumption that they do not have much time to perform their editing.  Their most important tool, the Quick Editor, has been designed to look similar to Microsoft Word (familiar to most adminstrators) and to perform its updates "in place" with a simple click of a button.  The PhotoSync utility was introduced to cut the time required to upload batches of photos by a factor of ten.  Clubessential provides club adminstrators with all the tools they need to quickly perform their editing and formatting, and then with a phone number to call for more complicated updates.

Clubessential's Support Staff use a more sophisticated set of tools that let them build the structure of a website, including the navigation, the security settings and the placement of components such as polling stations, calendars, news kiosks, etc.

The Studio Design Group employs advanced graphic design tools to create "Master Pages" that capture the graphical look and feel of a website design, ensuring it is carried though on all pages.  The Clubessential Master Page technology allows for "full canvas" designs without restrictions and yet allows each page to be editable for content maintenance.

Clubessential's Programming Staff have created a whole series of tools to help them automate the process of building, maintaining and enhancing club websites.  A system monitoring console, for example, graphs in real time the number of active sessions, the email engine queue, the RosterSync queue, and so forth.  Another tool logs any errors that occur, capturing related contextual data so the cause of errors can be tracked and corrected quickly.

By dividing the work of building and maintaining a website among these five groups, and equipping each group with tools that exactly match their needs and training, Clubessential maximizes the efficiency of the overall process.  This makes it practical and affordable to implement and maintain a lively beautiful custom website.