You don't need to pay a pro to craft or deal with your website any more. Is your site old and full of obsolete information because youīre avoiding the expense and delays involved with making updates to it?
Itīs time to stop hurling your money aside.
Major changes have come to the nature of website design and management. A significant amount of grooming was obligatory to be a web designer a decade ago. Website designers needed to be proficient with code generators like Front Page and Dreamweaver, and they needed to be familiar with exotic programming languages like HTML, ASP and PHP.
Well, stuff changes. Things are exceedingly different today.
Don't misunderstand what I'm saying, these talented people are still fundamental components of the web site design industry. There is a new technology, however, called a "CMS", or "Content Management System that makes them much less important in the development and maintenance of just about all straight forward websites. Any moderately computer capable individual can likely use this method to act as their own webmaster. A Content Management System is fundamentally just a "point and click site editor". You can use it to add and cut pages. You can also edit pages. All CMS include what is generally called a "WYSIWYG" editor, essentially just an exceptionally elementary word processor. Don't let the slang intimidate you! WYSIWYG just translates to "What You See is What You Get". It permits any user to format the page, upload pictures, and set up tables. You can even change the complete experience of the website by changing the site's Navigation Menu and setting up pages.
A Content Management System allows nearly any individual to promptly and simply serve all the functions that took a trained coder hours to do merely a few years ago.
A complimentary or low-cost CMS is available from nearly every single major web site hosting company. For just about all small to medium sized enterprises this is more than they require. A superior content management system for hosting small local business sites is available from GoDaddy.com, one of my favored website hosts. Making "shopping carts" on sites is made simple for retail website owners by applications like Paypal that connect easily into their websites. Intuit, a company that provides software for accounting and CPA firms has recently branched into this new mainstream market and their templates already include a shopping cart feature.
The difference, of course, is expense. Most designers are typically not as motivated as you are to get your jobs taken care of in an immediate manner and most make as much as $45 or more an hour. Weeks or longer is not an out of the ordinary delay on expert web design jobs.
This does not even include the time lost building the website. It can often take 200 hours or more to build a web site from scratch. That translates to months of waiting and thousands of dollars spent. these costs are voided by CMS providers by building websites in advance and offering menus of "ready-to-use" site styles.
Loads of Content Management System providers are able to tweak their existing styles quite inexpensively, if not outright copy your current website, for those website owners who are already thrilled with websites they have already spent piles of money on (or those who just balk at using "templates"). This is an emerging technology, but itīs disseminating very fast.
Of course the trouble with sites built in this manner is that, while low-priced and easy to manage, they ordinarily want for crucial content. Before you race off to GoDaddy do a Bing search for website providers that specialize in your certain industry. A whole side industry has been built around the demand for industry specialized content.
For example, let's pretend youīre an accountant. This subject happens to be within my expertise so it makes a good instance. You will get a variety of businesses that furnish sites specifically for accountants complete with CMS just by Google searching the key phrase "CPA Websites".
The best of these, IMHO, is CPA Site Solutions. For more than ten years we have devised excellent sites for CPA firms. We're also one of those content system providers on the cutting-edge that can "tweak" their styles or replicate existing websites. To see what we are referring to when we talk about "industry specific content" look at a sample CPA site:
http://samples.cpasitesolutions.com/?style=305
Make a note of 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 created specially for website owners in the accounting field. A site like this can be somewhat utile for a hugely limited number of firms outside their intended market, maybe a head-hunter or business consultant could use most of the features on this site, but it would be useless for a business like a retail store.
Many industries; retailers, contractors, schools, non-profit, restaurant and hotel, legal, medical; have comparable providers.
In these difficult economic times itīs past time to watch out for new solutions for almost all small and medium sized businesses. Using a Content Management System that matches your business will reduce your expenses and at the same time improve your administration over your site.
Brian O'Connell is the President and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's leading edge web design companies dedicated exclusively to CPA website design. His firm at present provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and bookkeeping firms.
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