Our New Website and CMS
We are proud to announce that we have launched our new website! We built it with the same CMS engine that runs lots of big websites, including portions of ABC Family, NASA, Lifetime Entertainment, Novell and thousands of others. Don't know what CMS is? It is a way for site owners to manage the content of their site through their web browser, without the assistance of their web developer. We can use the same CMS engine on your site if you want the ability to edit the content of your site on your own. Full text for more detail.
The CMS engine we have standardized on is called "Drupal", and there are others. CMS is Content Management System. It is the best way to build websites when the site owner wants to add/edit/delete content, text, images, pages, menus, and so on. Since all editing is done through a web browser, it is very easy to use. Many of our clients are on this CMS platform already, so if you need to see some additional examples, we'd be glad to take you through a tour of the system.
For more information about CMS and to see a video of Brad talking about it: Content Management
For more about our firm's CMS Express plan: CMS Express
For more about the CMS Express pricing: Plans and Pricing
The nice thing about the CMS platform we use and recommend (Drupal) is that it is open source. Thus, the software is free. That means that the development costs are drastically reduced since we don't charge for the software, we only bill for the time it takes us to install and configure it.
To make our site more informative and interactive, we posted videos where appropriate. We are still in the process of adding videos. What type of videos? Some are educational. Some are videos of our staff providing details on technology. Some are screen sharing videos of how to use certain programs like Microsoft Excel. Some are videos of our firm's summer parties. We are committed to adding more over time since videos are a rich format for communicating.
Our new Information Center is a feature I am proud of. We've pumped it full of educational materials, powerpoint presentations, articles, free tools, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The concept of that section was to provide value, education, and knowledge.
Some features we plan on rolling out are comment posts for the newsletter articles, Excel forums, affiliate login, and so much more. You know, if we waited to launch the new site until it was "done" the site would never launch. So, we decided to break it down into manageable phases. Phase 1 was to just get the basic site up. Future phases will continue to evolve the site, new videos, new forums, new features, all the time.
After having gone through this process internally, I see our website as living, and always being updated. That is probably the way most websites should be. Always current. Always being updated to reflect the current company. Until CMS though, making changes to your website was time consuming and cost-prohibitive since you always needed to ask your developer. Now with a CMS platform in place, changes are made at will and easily by the site owner. I know internally, it was exactly like this. Any change I needed to make to the site required the assistance of one of our developers. Now, I can make changes at will. Much better.
Well, we have put in hundreds of hours on the site, so I hope you all enjoy it!