Do you manage your web site using a well paid designer? There´s very nearly nothing worse for your professional persona than having a tired website full of exhausted information just because you´re avoiding the expense of changing it.
It´s time to administer of your own web site.
Enormous changes have come to the way we do website development and management. A decade ago the web design industry was reliant on the “website designer”, a pricey and (supposedly) well-trained professional who was capable of using HTML editors like Front Page and was fluent in weird programming languages like HTML.
Things are sincerely different today.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, these skilled people are still fundamental elements of the website design industry. There is an astonishing new technology, however, called a “CMS”, or “Content Management System that makes them much less essential in the building and care of most all business websites. To act as your own webmaster all you need to have is a cursory familiarity with computers using this approach. Essentially all a CMS is, actually, is a “point and click site editor”. It can be used to add and take out pages. Using what is typically called a “WYSIWYG editor”, essentially just a a very uncomplicated word processor, you can also edit pages. Don’t let the lingo scare you away! WYSIWYG just stands for “What You See is What You Get”. It permits you to format a page, create tables and upload photographs and images. You can also change the whole experience of the site by editing the website’s Navigation Menu and laying out pages.
All the functions that took a expensive code-monkey hours to do only years ago can now be rapidly and without difficultly performed by pretty much anybody with the help of a CMS.
Just about every single significant website hosting service offers a complimentary or inexpensive CMS with hosted sites. This is a lot more than most common businesses require. GoDaddy.com, one of my favored website hosts, has an excellent content management system for hosting small to medium sized enterprise websites. Making “shopping carts” on websites is made simple for retailers by services like Paypal that hook easily into retail websites. Intuit web site templates already contain a shopping cart feature. Intuit is a concern that provides excellent computer software for businesses and CPA firms and has lately branched into this exciting new mainstream market.
The difference, of course, is expense. Despite making make upwards of $25 an hour, most designers are typically not as motivated as you are to get your tasks taken care of in a quick fashion. Weeks or more is not an unusual turn-around on pro design jobs.
This does not even include the time lost constructing the website. Designing a web site from scratch can often take 200 hours or more. That translates to months of wait time and thousands of dollars invested. Content Management System site providers get around this expense by creating the websites in advance and offering menus of “ready-to-use” site styles.
Many Content Management System providers are able to fine-tune their pre-existing templates quite inexpensively, if not straight-out re-create your current website, for those website owners who are already very happy with websites they’ve already spent lots of money on (or those who just balk at using “templates”). This may be an emerging technology but it’s disseminating rather fast.
Alas, while low-priced and straight forward to manage, websites built in this manner commonly want for indispensable content. An entire side industry has been created around the necessity for industry specific content, so before dashing off to GoDaddy, do a Yahoo search for web providers that specialize in your certain business.
For example, let’s assume you´re a CPA. This happens to be inside my business so it makes a good example. Google search the key phrase “CPA Websites” and you will get a number of companies that provide sites specifically for accounting firms complete with CMS.
CPA Site Solutions is the best of these, in my humble opinion. We’ve been making fantastic websites for accounting firms for more than a decade. We’re also one of those content system providers on the cutting-edge that can “fine-tune” their site templates or copy pre-existing websites. To understand what we are suggesting when we talk about “industry specific content” take a good look at a demo accounting website:
http://samples.cpasitesolutions.com/?style=305
Make note of the tools designed principally for website owners in the CPA business: free reports, tax due dates, links to tax forms and publications, a portal for transferring accounting files, interactive financial calculators, email… Perhaps a financial adviser or business consultant could use some of the pages on this site,but it would be squandered on a business like a restaurant. A site like this is not intended to be valuable to a broad assortment of businesses. It’s genuinely only intended for accounting and CPA firms.
Many industries; retailers, contractors, education, non-profit, restaurant and hotel, law, medical; have equivalent providers.
For some big very specialized organizations it´s worth the time and expense of retaining skilled designers, but for almost all small and medium sized firms, especially in these hard economic times, it´s past time to reflect on new solutions. Finding a Content Management System that serves your company will trim your expenses and at the same time improve your power over your website.