A lot of small business owners are still spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars every year to have a highly paid pro operate their web sites. You don´t have to have an worn-out web site full of washed-out notes just because you dread the cost and delays of getting your designer to update it for you.
It´s time to stop casting your money away.
Enormous changes have come to the nature of site development. Quite recently website designers needed to be familiar with novel programming languages like HTML, ASP and PHP and able to use HTML generators like Dreamweaver. This individual needed a great deal of training and the industry was completely reliant on these expensive specialists.
Well, change happens. Things are really different now.
Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying, these talented people are still crucial elements of the web site design industry. There is a recent tool, however, called a “CMS”, or “Content Management System that makes them much less vital in the building and care of most all small business websites. Any reasonably computer proficient individual can probably use these tecniques to become their own webmaster. The Content Management System, or “point and click website editor”, is essentially just a predictable development of editing software that techies have used for years. You can use it to append and get rid of pages. Using what is often called a “WYSIWYG editor”, actually just a a very simple word processor, you can also modify pages. Don’t be freaked out by the vernacular! WYSIWYG simply means “What You See is What You Get”. It permits any user to format your page, upload images of all kinds, and construct tables. It also enables you to set up pages by editing the site’s Navigation Menu. This will change the overall experience of the web site
All the uses that took a costly code-monkey hours to do just a decade ago can now be promptly and with no trouble fulfilled by just about anybody with the help of a Content Management System.
These days users automatically get access to a free or low-priced CMS from pretty much every single important website hosting company. This is more than most normal businesses require. GoDaddy.com, one of my preferred website hosts, has a first rate content management system for hosting small to medium sized enterprise websites. Retail website owners will find it simple to establish “shopping carts” on their web sites by using a service like Paypal that links easily into a site. A business that provides programs and services for businesses and their CPA firms, Intuit, has only lately branched into this revolutionary mainstream market and their site templates already contain a shopping cart feature.
The difference, of course, is cost. Despite making make $25 to $45 an hour, most designers are normally not as motivated as you are to get your tasks taken care of in a quick fashion. It´s not out of the ordinary for turn around times on pro design jobs to be a a month or more.
This doesn’t even include the time lost constructing the website. It can frequently take 200 hours or more to construct a website from scratch. That translates to thousands of dollars spent and months of waiting. this expense are averted by CMS providers by constructing websites in advance and offering menus of “ready-to-use” site styles.
Loads of site owners balk at using “templates” or already have unique websites that they have spent scads of money on and are content with, so scores of CMS providers are able to fine-tune their pre-existing templates to better reflect your brand (if not straight-out duplicate your current site) quite inexpensively. This may be a recent technology but it’s disseminating very fast.
Of course the challenge with websites built in this way is that, while inexpensive and easy to manage, they ordinarily lack important content. Before you scamper off to GoDaddy do a Bing search for site hosts that specialize in your selected field. An entire side industry has blossemed encompassing the demand for industry specialized content.
Let’s say you´re an accountant. I chose this instance because this happens to be my specialty. Google search the key phrase “CPA Websites” and you will notice a variety of businesses that provide sites especially for accounting firms complete with Content Management System.
CPA Site Solutions is the best of these, in my opinion. For more than ten years we’ve created super websites for CPA firms. We’re also one of those cms companies on the cutting-edge that can “fine-tune” their site templates or replicate pre-existing sites. Look at a demo CPA website and you’ll understand what we are referring to when we talk about “industry specific content”:
http://samples.cpasitesolutions.com/?style=305
Check out the tools designed particularly for website owners in the accounting business: free reports, tax due dates, links to tax forms and publications, a portal for transferring accounting files, interactive financial calculators, email… A site like this possibly could be passably utile for a hugely limited number of concerns outside their intended market, maybe a financial adviser or business consultant could use a lot of the pages on this site, but it would be useless for a business like a hotel.
Many industries; retailers, builders, schools, non-profit, restaurant and hotel, law, medical; have similar providers.
For a few big highly specialized organizations it´s worth the time and cost of retaining expert designers, but for almost all small and medium sized businesses, especially in these hard economic times, it´s past time to pay attention to new solutions. Finding a CMS that suits your business will trim your expenses and at the same time increase your handle over your site.