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Are You Ready For A Content Management System?
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Written by Mark Connell
Categories: Front Page, Technology Blog
Tags: CMS, Content Management System, Website Development
Categories: Front Page, Technology Blog
Tags: CMS, Content Management System, Website Development
The evolution of websites has included several clear phases in capabilities and company strategy. The phases have been driven by advances in technology and software advancements. It’s clear that there is another huge shift taking place now and this is a great time to take advantage of the shift in cost and capabilities.
Phase 1 – The Emergence of the Web
Company Owners - “What is the web? What is a website? We gotta have one too.”
Website Technology - Flat HTML websites
CMS Techonlogy - No real good options
Phase 2 – Faster Internet Access
Company Owners - “We can put our marketing materials online?”
Website Technology - Better graphical tools produced web based brochure sites
CMS Technology - Some great content management systems, very expensive
Phase 3 – Custom Websites
Company Owners - “We need a custom site.”
Website Technology - Databases and custom developers. Expensive to produce and support.
CMS Technology - CMS still very expensive, developers make most content changes.
Phase 4 – The Emergence of the Affordable CMS
Company Owners - “We can manage our own content and it won’t cost a fortune?”
Website Technology - Many CMS options with lots of available plug-in components.
CMS Technology - CMS are affordable and development times drastically decreased.
We are in Phase 4 now and many companies are realizing the benefits of having a site built around a content management system. It is now more affordable to build a site around a content management system than to build it from scratch. Here are some benefits of using a content management system:
- Ability to easily manage your own content
- Easy to add in new functionality to enhance your site
- Built for tremendous search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social networking built-in, integration with Facebook
- Easy to create a community around your product
- Cheaper to produce and maintain
- Standard technology that can be updated to latest versions
- Easy to add blogs, connections to Twitter, and YouTube video
- Interactive website, no longer just a brochure that rarely changes
- You don’t have to rely on a developer to change your site content
It is a new time for companies and their approach to the internet. It’s time to build a community around your product and capture the flow of information and traffic before your competitor does. It is a different model now and your customers are looking for more than a brochure site to give them basic information.
With changes in CMS technology, you can easily take your internet strategy to the next level with a platform that will support your current needs but be able to scale with you as you grow. It’s now very affordable to put a CMS in place customized for your needs.
Other benefits include being able to edit your content in a Word-like application where you don’t need to know HTML or any other web technology formats. It’s WYSIWYG so what you see is what you get on the site. You can also change to a new design and use your existing content. Upgrading to a new site look and feel is easy and painless!
The CMS systems are open source and they are available to use without license fees. Open source means that you don’t have expensive software purchases up front or have to worry about the costs of upgrading to the latest version or yearly software costs! They also mean your time to market is much quicker and less expensive than deploying a website has ever been in the past.
The new CMS options are tremendous and open up exciting capabilities for any size business. They can make smaller companies appear larger and compete with much larger competitors on a level playing field. The companies who realize this huge shift and take advantage of these capabilities first can capture markets before others in the industry move in this direction.
NewSouth Interactive can help you brainstorm opportunities in your industry and build an interactive website that takes your web strategy to a new level. Contact us and we can start planning your new site today.
The Future of Outsourcing and Tips For New Outsourcing Industries
The world of information technology has been utilizing outsourced and offshore resources for years now and the market has become much more mature.
Now, other industries are dipping their toe into the waters of outsourcing work, and there are many things you can learn from experienced IT managers who have discovered the best ways to outsource work. The future will hold new industries and new countries becoming involved in outsourced work.
Here are a few industries that can and are benefiting from remote teams:
- Translation
- Accounting
- Human Resources
- Marketing
- Auditing
- Help Desk
- Engineering
- Backup and Security
- Consulting
- Drafting
- Architecture
- Legal
- Back Office Tasks
- Transcription
- Medical (including medical tourism)
There are many industries that could benefit from outsourcing repetitive tasks.
IT managers involved in managing outsourced teams have discovered that you can have successful offshore projects, but there are aspects of working with outsourced teams that aren’t for the faint of heart.
Here are some things I’ve learned from working with remote teams of designers and developers. These principles are important whether you are working with technology vendors or with other industries.
1. Not all outsourced teams are equal.
Sure, it’s tempting to consider outsourced work a commodity, but it isn’t. Good developers and designers still work faster and better than average developers and designers. The same is true for other professionals. Errors cost money and lose clients.
2. Finding good teams is more difficult than it sounds.
Having great teams makes all the difference in the world. If you don’t know who the good teams are, find someone who does. It can be even more difficult when you deal with larger organizations because you may not know exactly who will be actually doing the work. And make sure the company is a great partner that you can trust.
Peter Malkin’s Amazing List of Music Business Tools
The music business evolves and becomes more and more technical every day. It used to be so simple. You get a band together, get a couple of gigs, build your networks, and you are on your way to stardom.
The music business has been overturned multiple times in the last few years and new technology advances continue to change how music is produced, distributed, and promoted. Trying to stay up-to-date with all of the different aspects of online music tools and sites is a dizzying tasks with important new sites popping up almost daily.
Music industry veteran Peter Malkin recently released an epic video about the many tools available online for musicians, music lovers, and music promoters.
One of Peter’s final points is to get out there and do it the old fashioned way, but his list of sites is so expansive and valuable that it makes you thinks he favors a blend of the old and the new.
As Peter ticks off almost 100 tools, my initial thought was it would be great to have all of those tools available as links to check out. Peter didn’t have the links listed so I took some time and gathered the list and URLs for each tool.
If you aren’t in the music business but love music, there are quite a few gems in this list for finding and listening to music.
Here is Peter’s excellent but mind spinning video. Links to all of the sites Peter mentions are listed after the jump.
Make sure you check out Peter’s Blog too.
5 Terrific Data Visualization Applications
As technology advances, the amount of data collected continues to increase exponentially. Much of this data could be very useful if harnessed and presented in a way that turns it into Information.
This is “Part 1″ in a series of articles about great data visualization tools and applications.
One use of data visualization tools is corporate and government dashboards. Being able to apply data visualization tools to corporate and competitive data is a growing need in the information age. The tools to visualize the data continue to improve and evolve and corporate use allows for better trend identification and decision making.
Here are 5 outstanding data visualization tools:
1. Akamai Real Time Web Monitor
Akamai Real Time Web Monitor
Akamai is a company that handles a large percentage of the web’s traffic. As a result, they have an enormous amount of data moving through their networks. They monitor global Internet conditions around the clock in real time. With this real-time data they can identify the global regions with the greatest attack traffic, cities with the slowest Web connections (latency), and geographic areas with the most Web traffic (traffic density).
This is an interesting application because it allows a user to know in real time what is happening all over the world, in a visual manner. It takes a great amount of data and presents it in a very easy-to-view way.
Voyage RSS Reader
Voyage is a web-based RSS reader that visually displays RSS feeds on a timeline. It’s a great way to explore the different feeds you subscribe in a completely different format.
The application bubbles up content in a timeline based approach. You can surf through and move around the articles with the most important and most recent items getting priority positioning.
Voyage is a good model for future news and information interfaces because it allows for bringing the most relevant information to the forefront as it wades through mountains of information. Adding personalization to this and you’ve got a huge advance.
Top 10 Tips for Building a BI Dashboard
1. Before building your dashboard, spend a healthy amount of time determining what business information should be displayed on the primary display.
The best time to work through these issues is before you start working on the technology. Sometimes it is good to get an outsider that isn’t embedded in all of the issues of the day to help you work through this conceptually.
2. Don’t try to put everything in the dashboard
The dashboard should be the top level view for that person. It doesn’t need to everything imaginable in it. It takes work to get to the real important issues but narrowing it down will pay off in the end.
3. Make sure you have access or can collect the data you want to measure.
This seems to be a no-brainer but you’d be surprised how many things that are important AREN’T being tracked or recorded. Sometimes you need to add systems to get to the data you need.
4. Know the dashboard audience and understand what information they need.
It’s easy to make assumptions about what people need to make decisions. Make sure the people involved have input and a voice in the process.
Avoiding Technical Headaches – Tips for Migrating to a New Website
Migrating your website can be a real hassle. And if it is done poorly, the result can reflect poorly on your company. In addition to migrating to a new site, you may also be migrating to a new hosting provider. Migrating a DNS can also lead to other problems like email issues and breaking of internal processes.
So how do you plan to make sure it goes smoothly? Make sure you ask the right questions, have a solid migration plan, and triple check everything. Here are some things to help you evaluate and interview new firms to ensure a smooth transition.
Understand the Technology
Current site:
- Do you have access to the current site’s files?
- Your current site is built on a technology platform. Do you own the platform?
- Is it portable?
- Can you extract your content out of it for use in the new system?
Proposed Site:
- What platform will be used?
- Is the technology platform standard or is it a rarely used platform that only that vendor can support?
- Is it proprietary?
- Will it scale to suit your future needs?
- How much maintenance will it need and who will provide the maintenance?
- Where is it hosted? Is it in a secure facility with redundant connectivity?
- What is the backup policy and cost?
Executive Dashboards and BI – Solving the Executive Blind Spot
Every company has large amounts of data sitting in databases across the organization. There are database administrators and developers that know about all of this data. They know that this hidden data could be information, business intelligence, that could be used for decision making on all of the management levels.
In most cases, this information doesn’t bubble up to the executives that make the decisions and if it does, it isn’t in a format that is easy to decipher. This information could mean competitive advantages and a differentiator for the company if it could be accessed by executives and management while they are analyzing and making decisions.
Why is this information not being used? Is it because it is hard to find the important nuggets of information in the waves of data? Yes, this is part of it. Expert analysis and knowing where to dig can solve this problem. It takes some concentrated effort by people who understand both the business strategy and the data.
The Google Instant Alphabet – The Holy Grail for SEO
Recently, Google released instant search. Google Instant Search means as you are typing in your search terms, Google instantly displays results on every keystroke.
Thinking about this, I came up with a couple of interesting ideas. One, advertising on partial keywords and letters will be more important. For instance, advertising on a keyword like “insur” or “automo” will get you shown even before the complete word is typed into the search engine.
Taking that a step farther, coming up on partial searches organically is also more important now.
This changes the whole game!
The SEO holy grail is coming up on a single letter, basically the Google instant alphabet. The instant alphabet shows results of the biggest and most important brands in the world. Having your site displayed on an alphabet search is the height of SEO.
Here are the currently biggest brands based on the Google instant alphabet:
| A | Amazon, AOL, Apple, ATT, Alumz. |
| B | Bank of America, Best Buy, Bing. |
| C | Craigslist, Costco, CNN, Chase. |
| D | Dictionary, Disneyland. |
| E | Ebay, ESPN, Expedia, Evite. |
| F | Facebook, Fandango |
| G | Gmail, Google maps, Google. |
| H | Hotmail, Hulu, Home Depot, HP. |
| I | Iphone, Ikea, IMDB. |
| J | Justin Bieber, Jet Blue, Java. |
| K | Kroger, Kaiser, Kayak, Kohls. |
| L | Lowes, LinkedIn, Limewire. |
| M | Mapquest, Myspace, MSN. |
| N | Netflix, Nordstrom, NBA. |
| O | Office Depot, Orbitz. |
| P | Pandora, Publix, Paypal, Petco. |
| Q | QVC, Quicktime. |
| R | REI, Ross. |
| S | Skype, Sears, Southwest Airlines. |
| T | Target, Twitter, Thesaurus, Travelocity. |
| U | USPS, UPS, United Airlines. |
| V | Verizon, Virgin Mobile. |
| W | Weather, Walmart, Wells Fargo, Webbieworld, Wikipedia. |
| X | Droid X, Xbox, XM Radio, Xfinity. |
| Y | Yahoo, Youtube Yelp. |
| Z | Zappos, Zillow, Zynga. |
The Importance of Pay Per Click (PPC)
Many sites are built but not many sites get significant traffic. It is a difficult chore to get your site noticed, even if you are providing a valuable service. There is considerable effort and cost that goes into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and rightfully so. If you can dial up the magic combination that gets your site organic traffic from a search engine, your site can flourish.
SEO takes time. For one, it takes time for your site to be indexed. Another reason is that new sites generally suffer in things like Page Rank and length of time being indexed so it won’t rank high overall.
This is where Pay Per Click comes in. PPC through sites like Google will bring people to your site based on keywords that you choose immediately. It can kickstart your site into overdrive as soon as your campaign starts. The best things about PPC are:
- Immediate Traffic
- Cost Effective
- Keyword Based
- Great Analytical Tools
MIT Courses Online for FREE
You can find lots of educational information online for free. Sure, you won’t get a degree from it but just think of the knowledge that you can get by going through the MIT online courses.
Or if you ever just wondered if you could cut it at MIT… here’s your chance to see what they are studying there. Information is great, free information is even better. There is no reason not to educate yourself if you really want the knowledge.