What's a CMS and will it Save Your Firm Money?
Are you are paying somebody to manage your site? Is your site from way back and full of obsolete facts because you´re dreading the expense and frustration involved with making updates to it?
It´s time to stop casting your money away.
The way websites are designed and maintained has changed enormously. A good deal of grooming was needed to be a website designer a decade ago. Designers had to be capable of using source editors like Dreamweaver, and they had to be fluent in mysterious programming languages like HTML.
Well, stuff changes. Things are actually different today.
There is a contemporary instrument called a "Content Management System" or "CMS" that makes experts much less important to the construction and care of most small to medium enterprise websites. Any fairly computer literate person can likely use these tecniques to be their own webmaster. A Content Management System is fundamentally just a "point and click website editor". It can be used to append and get rid of pages. All CMS contain what's frequently called a "WYSIWYG" editor, , in point of fact, just a remarkably easy word processor that permits you to edit pages. Don't be scared away by the vernacular! WYSIWYG only translates to "What You See is What You Get". It allows a user to arrange the page, upload images, and build tables. It also enables you to set up pages by altering the site's Navigation Menu. This will change the entire feel of the website
All the duties that took a expert designer hours to do no more than years ago can now be promptly and simply performed by very nearly any individual with the aid of a Content Management System.
A complimentary or low-priced CMS is included from almost every single significant web site hosting provider. This is leaps and bounds beyond what most common businesses need. One of my favorite website Hosts, GoDaddy.com, has a superior content management system for hosting small to medium sized business sites. An application like Paypal that connects easily into their site makes it straight forward to establish "shopping carts" on retail websites. A business that supplies high quality programs and services for businesses and their accounting firms, Intuit, has recently branched into this revolutionary mainstream market and their web site templates already include a shopping cart feature.
The difference, of course, is cost. Most designers are typically not as motivated as you are to get your tasks completed in a prompt manner and most make $25 to $45 per hour. Expert web design jobs can have turn around on web design jobs of 30 days or more.
This doesn't even include the time spent constructing the site. Constructing a website from scratch can regularly take 200 hours or more. That means months of wait time and thousands of dollars invested. Content Management System web site providers void these costs by constructing the websites in advance and offering menus of "ready-to-use" website templates.
Of course a number of site owners already have custom websites that they have spent piles of money on and are pleased with and others balk at using "templates", so a number of CMS providers are able to fine-tune their pre-existing templates to better reflect your brand, if not outright re-create your current website, quite inexpensively. While this is a young technology it's disseminating very fast.
Sadly, while economical and straight forward to manage, sites built in this manner normally lack indispensable content. The requirement for industry specific content has given rise to a whole side industry surrounding the necessity for industry specialized content, so before dashing off to GoDaddy, do a Yahoo search for website hosts that focus on your selected industry.
Let's say you´re a CPA. This subject happens to be in my professional specialty so it makes a good case. You will see a number of businesses that furnish sites specifically for CPA firms complete with CMS just by Google searching the key phrase "CPA Websites".
CPA Site Solutions is the best of these, in my opinion. We've been creating fantastic sites for accounting firms for more than 10 years.. We're also one of those CMS companies on the cutting-edge that can "tweak" their website styles or copy existing sites. To find out what we mean when we talk about "industry specific content" look at a sample CPA website:
https://samples.cpasitesolutions.com/?style=305
Check out the free reports, tax due dates, links to tax forms and publications, a portal for transferring accounting files, interactive financial calculators, email, and a host of similar tools designed principally for site owners in the CPA industry. Possibly a head-hunter or business consultant could use a little of the tools on this website,but it would be thriftless for a business like a hotel. A website like this is not designed to be worthwhile to a wide smorgasbord of businesses. It's truly only intended for accounting and CPA firms.
Many industries; retailers, construction, training, non-profit, restaurant and hotel, law, medical; have equivalent providers.
In these tough economic times it´s time to keep an eye on new solutions for many small and medium sized companies. Utilizing a CMS that caters to your company will reduce your costs and at the same time improve your influence over your site.