Content Management Systems

Editing HTML is dead!

In the (bad!) old days, a company bought a website from a web design company. These were often expensive - typically many thousands of pounds, which is no small amount for a sole trader or small business. They got their shiny new website, and all was good with the world. But then something changed - a team member left, company details changed, they moved offices, opened a new office - the list is endless. To update their website they had to go back their web design company, and brief them of the changes, wait some time, but more importantly shell out some more hard-earned money! Consequently, their websites didn't get updated, or were constantly out of date. Search engines favour websites that are updated regularly, so unwittingly these sites were downgrading themselves on the search engines too!

The solution to this is a Content Management System - a system that allows you to login to your website and make the changes yourself. There are many such CMS systems - we tend to use Umbraco, but one of the commonest is Wordpress.

We have a number of reasons for choosing Umbraco:

• Free - if you're a small business you don't want the tens of thousands of pounds of say Sitecore (yes, Sitecore does a lot more than just a CMS). You can download and use Umbraco for free.
• Open source - you can view and modify the source code if Umbraco doesn't do exactly what you need
• .NET based - we use .NET, so having an environment that's already in our language / known environment means we hit the ground running
• It's good - the most important feature is that it's good! It does what is says on the tin!

By creating your website as a CMS you will pay a small amount extra at the beginning, but will recover that extra cost by being able to manage and update your website yourself.