People expect more from the Internet these days. Just 5 years ago, having a small, information-only website was enough to be ‘good.’ Now, the demands have changed, and to compete with industry leaders, you need to implement a lot of new features. Fortunately, today’s content management systems make that task easier than ever.
By building you website on a content management system (CMS) - like Drupal or Joomla - you’ll find it’s very easy to add/change content, additional features and plug-ins that used to take serious development time are now available in easy-to-install packages, and built-in blogging software (which you should be using to regularly add content to your site for SEO) is easy to use and search engine friendly.
Think of a CMS as the powerful groundwork for easily making your website do more. As your visitors expect more from your website, you can meet and exceed their expectations by taking advantage of the main features of a content management system:
* Update your site’s content without ever talking to your webmaster. A lot of the frustration in maintaining a website is the response time of the average web maintenance request. With a CMS, there’s no reason to talk to your webmaster for routine updates - just log in to your administration area, click the page you want to change, make your changes, and click ‘Save.’ It’s all done! If you’d like to add a new page, the process is similar in complexity (or should I say, simplicity). No more waiting on important updates to your content - now you can do it from any computer with Internet access.
* Add powerful applications and plug-ins with only a few clicks. Note the ’share’ buttons at the bottom of this page. From the time I thought ?Hey, I should add those little social networking buttons to the bottom of my pages, to the time that they were there, was about 30 seconds. I just typed in ’social buttons’ on the plug-in finder, clicked ‘install’ on the popular package, and it was automatically downloaded to my web server, installed, and activated, just like that. The same is true for analytics software, spam-blocking apps, and many other useful plug-ins. These add value by allowing your visitors to easily share your website with their network, and save you time by weeding out the spam comments. There are tons of different plug-ins, for just about everything you can think of, and the right combination can really make your website perform at its best.
* Search engines love content management systems. Well, as long as you install the SEO plug-in - which gives you search engine friendly URLs (www.yoursite.com/sweet-article-title instead of www.yoursite.com/?=node_32?=article). More specifically, search engines love fresh content, and by using a CMS, search engines think that your content will be updated more frequently than others, giving you a more frequent crawl rate (which is good because the changes and pages you add to your site will be indexed sooner and show up on the search results page faster).
* Starting and maintaining a blog just got easy. There’s no code to learn, just click ‘New Post,’ and start typing. When you’re finished, hit ‘Publish’ or ‘Save’ and it’s automatically featured on your home page and added to the correct categories you chose. With the SEO pack, the article is also submitted to the search engines. I notice that after I finish an article, it takes less than 24 hours for Google to have it in its index. One time it only took 45 minutes! Corporate blogging is something you need to do if you aren’t already. Having a large collection of helpful articles is important for showing your industry expertise and attracting more visitors to your website.
* E-Commerce is fully supported - and encouraged! Joomla’s VirtueMart extension is one of the most widely used shopping carts because it’s secure, efficient, and fully customizable. It plugs into your Joomla-based website, and provides a full-featured shopping cart and checkout system for your customers, as well as inventory and order management systems to help you manage your products more effectively.
As you can see, there are some very sizable advantages to using a Web 2.0 CMS as a backbone for your new website, giving you the capability to create an excellent user experience for your visitor, and grow your business using the power of the Internet. As always, I’m here for your comments and questions - email me - tony[at]vanivo[dot]com.