Web-site Publishing, Maintenance, and Best Practices for Relevant Content

Effective web-sites present current, relevant, and timely information to reinforce other marketing efforts and ultimately support the sales activities that result in increased sales. it is therefore important for the stakeholder (web-site owner and main beneficiary) to be able to promptly modify information that is on the web-site that is used to inform the public, cultivate prospects and convert traffic into qualified leads and sales opportunities.

Resident Webmaster

Having been a webmaster in the past, I must admit that making periodic changes and updates to the content of a website is not meant to be part of a webmaster's To Do list in these days of Web Content Management Systems. In the past, this may have been a logical option as Web CMS systems were only accessible to organizations that had tens of thousands and event hundreds of thousand of dollars at their disposal to purchase and develop a CMS solutions. At that time, webmasters would receive content updates from content editorial staff in text format and handle the task of HTML coding it and linking to it from other relevant pages; a labour intensive and inefficient way to update content. The webmaster bottle-neck did and continues to prevent marketers and sales staff from availing useful supporting information to their prospective customers to reinforce their other efforts to generate leads and increase sales.

Content Management Solution

In the recent past, Open Source content management infrastructure and applications have become more and more robust and accessible to at no up-front cost. The only cost attached to these solutions is the maintenance that has to be done by an in-house web producer/developer to configure, support and upgrade the Content Management System. This path has enabled even the smallest organizations with technological insight to obtain features, functionality and benefits that were previously reserved to large corporations such as CNN, Oracle, Microsoft and Vignette that had the money and the know-how to implement and maintain such robust content management systems.

Benefits of a Web Content Management System

A Web CMS provides a network distributed collaborative information production environment that enables members of an organization to contribute and publish web content without any need for training beyond orientation with a common WYSWYG work processor such as Open Office and Microsoft Word. In addition to this democratisation of web publishing and the obvious efficiency and speed with which content can be updated and managed, CMS applications come with a toolkit of features that enable the classification, search, and life-cycle management of published content for 'findability' and re-purposing across a website, or a family of web-sites that run from connected Database servers.

This document is part of a growing library of Web Content Management Solutions. Contact us for solutions to your needs and regarding the development and implementation of a Web Content Management System