Business Marketing and Technology

Gone are the days of having your website be a static brochure for your company. You need to be adding and changing content on a daily (or at least weekly) basis to really start to enhance your website.

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.

In this Web 2.0 world, a CMS is the ultimate tool for easily tying together all the features you need to make your website successful. Here is what your website should be doing for your business, and how a CMS helps you achieve your goal:

• Easily edit your content without special software or contacting you ‘web guy.’ When you use a CMS, you can login with your username/password and have an ‘EDIT’ button on each page. Clicking ‘EDIT’ allows you to modify the content of that page like you would make changes to a word document, with no risk of ruining the overall layout or styling of the website. This saves you the maintenance cost of your webmaster, and you get to make the changes on your own schedule, not theirs.
• 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).
• It’s easy to blog when you use the right software. A corporate blog is no longer an option if you want to be a leader in your field. By blogging on topics relevant to your industry, you’re establishing yourself as an industry authority, creating a resource for your visitors and customers, and raising your search engine rankings by becoming a large source of content on your topic. The mainstream content management systems have a blogging plug-in (or are already set up in Blog Mode, like WordPress), making your life easier.
• 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, post your questions and comments below, and if you found this article helpful, please Digg it!

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Tony Kau is co-founder of Portland web design and Internet marketing company Vanivo.  For service inquiries, you can contact him directly at tony -at- vanivo.com.

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Tony Kau blog, cms, web design, website