Posts tagged "web site"

What is a CMS and How can it Save Your Business Money?

Are you are paying somebody to deal with your site? Is your website from way back and full of obsolete notes because you´re dreading the expense and time involved with making updates to it?

It´s time to stop pitching your money away.

Fast changes have come to the character of web site design and management. A decade ago the web design business was dependent on the “web designer”, a costly and (presumably ) practiced person who was able to use HTML generators like Front Page and Dreamweaver and was familiar with bizarre programming languages like PHP.

Currently things are really different.

Individuals with these abilities still have immense benefit, but as a general rule of thumb small to medium sized enterprises can get by perfectly okay without them thanks to the invention of a revolutionary new tool called the “Content Management System” or “CMS”. These systems make it workable for any moderately computer competent soul to act as their own webmaster. Essentially all a Content Management System is, truly, is a “point and click website editor”. You can use it to append and take out pages. You can also modify pages using what is oftentimes called a “WYSIWYG editor” which is , in point of fact, just an impressively elementary word processor. Don’t let the jargon browbeat you! WYSIWYG merely means “What You See is What You Get”. It allows you to format the page, fashion tables and upload images. By enabling you to make alterations  to the website’s Navigation Menu you can also lay out your entire experience .

Concisely, a Content Management System allows practically anyone to speedily and easily do all the duties that took a master code-monkey hours to do only a decade ago.

These days customers automatically get access to a complimentary or economical content management system from most every single serious website hosting service. This is a lot more than most common businesses need. One of my favorite site Hosts, GoDaddy.com, has a superior content management system for hosting small business sites. Constructing “shopping carts” on websites is made easy for retail site owners by applications like Paypal that connect effortlessly into retail websites. Intuit, a huge company that supplies programs and services for businesses and their CPA firms has only lately branched into this fresh mainstream market and their web site templates already include a shopping cart feature.

The difference, of course, is cost. Most website designers make as much as $45 or more an hour, and they´re usually not as motivated as you are to get your jobs finished in an immediate manner. It´s not atypical for turn around times on pro web design jobs to be a weeks or more.

null It can frequently take 200 hours or more to build a website from scratch. That means thousands of dollars spent and months of wait time. this expense are averted by Content Management System providers by building websites in advance and presenting menus of “ready-to-use” website templates.

Of course a number of website owners already have unique websites that they have spent stacks of cash on and are very pleased with and others resist using “templates”, so loads of CMS providers are able to tweak their pre-existing templates to better reflect your brand, if not straight-out replicate your current site, quite inexpensively. This may be a new technology but it’s spreading exceedingly fast.

Of course the challenge with sites built in this manner is that, while economical and easy to manage, they ordinarily lack underlying content. The demand for industry focused content has given rise to an entire side industry surrounding the need for industry specific content, so before running off to GoDaddy, do a Yahoo search for web providers that specialize in your selected occupation.

For example, let’s say you´re an accountant. I used this model because this happens to be my expertise. You will stumble on an assortment of businesses that provide websites specifically for CPAs complete with Content Management System just by Google searching the key phrase “CPA Websites”.

The best of these, IMHO, is CPA Site Solutions. We’ve been building top-notch sites for CPA firms for more than ten years. We’re also one of those content  system companies on the cutting-edge that can “tweak” their site styles or re-create pre-existing sites. Take a look at a demo accounting site and you’ll understand what we are referring to when we talk about “industry specific content”:

http://samples.cpasitesolutions.com/?style=305

Note the tools designed specially for website owners in the CPA industry: free reports, tax due dates, links to tax forms and publications, a portal for transferring accounting files, interactive financial calculators, email… A site like this can be passably useful for a tremendously limited number of concerns outside their intended market, possibly a financial adviser or business consultant could use a lot of the tools on this website, but it would be squandered on a business like a retail store.

Many industries; retail, construction, training, non-profit, restaurant and hotel, legal, medical; have comparable providers.

For a number of big highly specialized companies it´s worth the time and money of retaining expert designers, but for almost all small and medium sized firms, especially in these severe economic times, it´s past time to consider new solutions. Finding a CMS that suits your business will reduce your costs and at the same time improve your command over your website.