Are you are paying someone to deal with your site? Many sites are from way back and full of washed-out notes because the owner doesn´t want to contend with the cost and time involved in working with a designer.
It´s time to stop pitching your money aside.
The way websites are built and managed has changed a great deal. A good deal of training was required to be a web designer a decade ago. Website designers needed to be capable of using source generators like Front Page, and they had to be familiar with curious programming languages like HTML, ASP and PHP.
Well, times have changed. Things are really different now.
There is a contemporary instrument called a “CMS”, or “Content Management System that makes experts much less essential to the building and upkeep of just about all simple websites. Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying: these skilled people are still crucial elements of the web site design industry, but their application is shifting focus. To act as your own webmaster all you require is a passing acquaintance with computers using these tecniques. A Content Management System is basically just a “point and click website editor”. You can use it to append and cut out pages. You can also modify pages using what’s frequently referred to as a “WYSIWYG editor” which is really just a terrifically simple word processor. As usual the language isn’t nearly as horrific as it may sound! WYSIWYG merely stands for “What You See is What You Get”. It enables any user to construct tables and upload pictures, and otherwise plan a page. It also enables you to set up pages by editing the website’s Navigation Menu. This will change the overall feel of the website
Concisely, a Content Management System allows most anybody to rapidly and without problems manage all the duties that took a professional programmer hours to do barely years ago.
Nowadays you automatically get access to a free or economical CMS from pretty much every single leading website hosting provider. For virtually all small businesses this is well more than they need. A superior content management system for hosting small to medium sized enterprise web sites is available from GoDaddy.com, one of my favorite site hosts. A service like Paypal that hooks easily into a site makes it easy to create “shopping carts” on retail websites. Intuit, a business that provides software and services for businesses and their accounting firms has lately branched into this revolutionary new mainstream market and their web site templates already include a shopping cart feature.
The difference, of course, is cost. Most web designers make $25 or more per hour, and they´re typically not as motivated as you are to get your jobs completed in an immediate manner. Professional website design jobs can have waits on web design jobs of 30 days or longer.
This doesn’t even include the time lost building the website. It can easily take 200 hours or more to construct a web site from scratch. That translates to thousands of dollars spent and months of wait time. Content Management System website providers avert this expense by constructing the sites in advance and presenting menus of “ready-to-use” styles.
More and more Content Management System providers are able to tweak their existing styles quite inexpensively, if not straight-out re-create your current site, for those site owners who are already pleased with websites they’ve already spent scads of money on (or those who just balk at using “templates”). While this is a new technology it’s disseminating quite fast.
Of course the difficulty with sites built in this fashion is that, while low-cost and simple to manage, they normally lack underlying content. A whole side industry has sprung up surrounding the need for industry focused content, so before rushing off to GoDaddy, do a Google search for site hosts that focus on your selected business.
Let’s assume you´re a CPA. This happens to be within my specialty so it makes a good model. You’ll notice a variety of companies that furnish websites especially for CPA firms complete with CMS just by Google searching the key phrase “CPA Websites”.
As far as i’m concerned CPA Site Solutions is the best of these. For more than 10 years we’ve made great websites for accounting firms. We’re also one of those cms companies on the cutting-edge that can “tweak” their templates or re-create pre-existing sites. Visit a demonstration accounting site and you’ll understand what we are referring to when we talk about “industry specific content”:
http://samples.cpasitesolutions.com/?style=305
Make 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 designed carefully for website owners in the accounting business. A site like this might be fairly utile for an enormously limited number of firms outside their intended market, maybe a head-hunter or business consultant could use most of the pages on this website, but it would be a waste for a business like a restaurant.
Many industries; retailers, builders, training, non-profit, restaurant and hotel, law, medical; have parallel providers.
It´s worth the time and cost of retaining professional designers for certain big very specialized companies, but for most small and medium sized enterprises, especially in these grueling economic times, it´s time to reflect on new solutions. Finding a CMS that fits your business will reduce your costs and at the same time increase your administration over your site.