The Future Of Web Design Is Content Management!
By: Martin Lemieux
Web development has greatly increased in popularity over the last 5 years. Many new design concepts, code standards, and technology advances have happened in a short amount of time. With that, so has the knowledge and demand for better, more independent and functional web design packages.
More and more we are starting to see a shift in consumer demand for the increasingly popular website content management system.
Most website owner's are typical business entrepreneurs who don't have the time to chase down their web design company for some minor updates that usually cost an arm and a leg. Updates for websites are becoming more and more necessary. It's now a reality and a trend that in order to make something happen with your website online, you need to stay on top of things and create new content to keep visitors coming back.
As entrepreneurs, we all get new creative ideas almost every day on how to improve our products or services. Without the ability to update our own website's, those fresh, new ideas may not become a reality for a long time.
Website Content Management Systems Are The Future:
This is somewhat of a call out to all web design companies. If you cannot offer content management to your clients, you may be left in the dust within a few years. The more affordable content management becomes, the more in demand it will be. Without giving your prospects this crucial option, you may lose a great chunk of your potential clients to the next web design company that has a fully automated system that states: "all the consumer has to do is login and get started."
Granted, there will always be a need for web designers. That is an understatement but with the option of content management, you can also decrease the amount of work needed to put into each project and concentrate more on marketing your business and it's services.
Content Management Gives The Consumer The Freedom They Need!
Without giving too much freedom that may make the website look bad, there is a high demand for the ability to update a website when needed, not when convenient. People like to have power over managing their own company, content management gives them the freedom they need to expand on their own terms, without extra costs.
Here Are Typical Features Of A "CMS":
- Add/remove/edit pages.
- Update content within each page.
- Add images where needed.
- Update contact information.
- Show updated listings (i.e. Real estate listings, Mortgage rates).
- Add new tips on their industry everyday (The spawn of blogging).
+ Many extra features not listed here.
Take The Real Estate Industry For Example:
In the last 2 years, "Real Estate Content Management Systems" are popping up everywhere we look. I can recall reviewing over 50 websites that offer this style of service. And why not! Real estate agents as a whole spend a great deal of money marketing themselves. Just in the last couple of years, real estate agents have seen more value in marketing online than they have through regular print media. Many real estate agents I know would rather spend $4,000 for a website rather than spend $4,000 getting listed in the local telephone book.
In Conclusion:
If you offer web design services and have (CMS) Content Management Systems available to your visitors, this might be the time to consider this ever growing popular service for your company. You won't regret putting in the effort of developing your own system and marketing it, there is a shifting demand for this ever-popular freedom online.
Author for this Article:
Martin Lemieux is the owner of the Smartads Advertising Network helping companies like yours to increase your business further!
International: http://www.smartads.info
Ezine Article Directory: http://www.article99.com
RSS/XML Feed: http://www.article99.com/RSS/Martin-R-Lemieux.xml
Copyright © 2005 Smartads Advertising Network
How Web Templates Are Helping Online Businesses to MultiplyTheir Income
By John Teh
Web templates by nature are created to aid and ease the strenuous process of a typical web development phase. Idea collection, analysis, research, design are just a small part of a bigger picture. It is no doubt with the availability of web templates, we can almost eliminate the need of research and initial analysis, although not entirely.
Theoretically, most of the time and hard work spent on initial research and development are packaged into one simple idea which web templates. What you have to do is simply to spend some time hunting for the right web templates which coincide with all your ideas and research plans.
If you need additional resources to enhance the looks of your web templates, site like http://www.sxc.hu provides a huge database of excellent high quality free images. You might want to also try out http://www.bluevertigo.com.ar for a comprehensive database of sites with free images, logos, clip arts, photoshop brushes, etc.
An online business typically requires you to have a website to get your messages and identity securely in place. In fact in almost all cases, websites are the main backbone depository for the most widely seek item on the net today - Information. Although in numerous exceptional cases, there are still loopholes for businesses to operate successfully without even having a website, the risks of taking such route is just unprofitable in the long term.
Regardless of the level of complexity on how "information" can be, it's one of the most flexible medium to be sold on the Internet today. Digital information products are relatively easy to compile and create, and given the fact that it is packaged and delivered digitally, the prospect of multiplying different variety of such products can be accomplished within a reasonable short period of time.
Simply put, the more online business websites you produce on the long run, the higher the level of multiplication of your income will take place. Exactly like how you would work out a couple of jobs a day just take make ends meet. Only in this case and this time, it is so much easier to accomplish, and consequently, save you a lot more of your time.
Each time someone brings up the topic about online businesses, it is unavoidable to relate both quality and quantity within the big picture. Realistically speaking, quality always win above all when it comes to the definition of a successful online business. Comparatively speaking, it is undeniably better to have both quality and quantity going at the same time.
As indispensable it is to have a nice looking website with rich content, it is a very well known fact that humans by nature, simply dislike heavy long monotonous workloads. Based on the very definition of simplicity, web templates can just simply provide that comfort and time saving capabilities.
As more and more individuals venturing into various online businesses today, it is not uncommon to come across web design solutions that provide completion timeframe within the range of hours or even minutes. Massive expansion through ready made web templates as they call it, brings the customers the satisfaction of expanding their online businesses to a greater level, without sacrificing the overall quality.
A majority of these sites usually fall into the informative based category, providing visitors with guides, information, and product recommendations on a selected niche. Advertisements too, play a big supporting role in the income generating picture. Although not a preferred method by many, advertisements do provide extra relevant source of information to the visitors, and that extra income for the webmasters.
Looking at how Internet grows today, it's almost impossible to keep yourself in line with the latest and current flow. The idea of a successful online business itself has practically unlimited methods of penetration, making it a field which is almost impossible to completely master. Looking at the brighter side, infinite possibilities also mean infinite income making possibilities.
Voice in Article Marketing from Homer to Today: The Power of the Written Word
Article marketing in the fast paced rhythm of a high tech virtual reality reopens an archaic debate about the power of the written word. The art of marketing through articles is as old as poetry itself and can trace its history as far back as some 720 years before Christ, with the oldest written works known to human kind. The Iliad and the Odyssey were finally put into written form with the intention of disseminating a way of thinking, a voice if you will as would any article today. As the ancient Athenians knew, and the Roman senate later discovered, the art of rhetoric is not of a promotional nature, but of an empathic nature, thriving off the passions of both voice and ear. Publishing an article is to give voice to that which the rhetorician has determined as essential to ones discourse, by choosing wisely the time and place of announcement.
The art of disseminating ones discourse in and of itself is as old as the first Aedos. Bards and Poets from ancient Greece had no one plot of land to bequeath national pride, but rather smaller city nation states, as we do today amongst the private corporations throughout the electronic sea of virtual islands that float in an ocean of navigating information. What was it then to be Greek? It was in their stories, in their music and in their poetry. Three things made a person Greek. To be Greek was to share language, religion and Homer. One people over a great distance bonded through the voice of their Aedos (Bards, and Poets). Thought turned into words; into national pride and into power, through the awe of human voice. Article marketing is but a mere shadow of this long forgotten art, but still as powerful, if not even more, with the velocity and advance of modern technology.
When building the foundations of an incredibly well written article, the intention is as important today as in the times of Simonides (Greek poet 556 BC - 468 BC). Of what, does one write? The intention of article marketing today should not be to promote one self and ones websites. Visitors, backlinks, recognition of one's self and websites are all consequences of the main objective or intent. The main intention should always be, quality. This does not merely mean that an article is well written, but that it states something original, something different and distinguishable from the rest. An article of quality is more
than informative, more than simple expertise; an article of quality is inspired by the nine daughters of Mnemosyne (goddess of memory); the Muses. An article of quality is one touched by the heart's passions.
If the only intention when writing an article for future marketing is to promote or sell, then the article has already destroyed itself before even being written. Those, who slept in the Roman Senate did so because there was no reason to listen, the arguments were well known and well overheard. What makes a Roman senator listen, when he has heard it all? Passion... When the Muse has touched the very soul of the poet or statesman, when a link or a key word are no longer that mediocre intent,
but the deep emotional need to be heard is the intent, passion itself has become the intent. Augustus Caesar, did not take Rome to war with Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra the VII of Egypt by concentrating on war itself and the advantages of war. He took Rome to war with his intent set on fear and his heart on the passion for life. The art of knowing where to direct attention is as old as the art of Rhetoric itself, Socrates tells us the tale of the Egyptian god Toth who invented the written word, is this the origin of persuasion? No matter, the important thing is that we learn how content should be written, with the
direction of quality, links, traffic, backlinks and recognition, are natural consequences.
To give voice on the fast paced cybernetic reality of electronic spider webs, it is necessary to choose wisely the point from which to broadcast. If heroic tales of Troy in the Iliad or the humbling romantic adventures of the Odyssey were to be heard, they not only needed quality they needed an audience willing to listen. Homer gave ethnic identity to a people with no homeland or ruler, and common gods to follow. Homer offered an integral part of what it was to be Greek, he offered identity. Article marketing can ask no less of its writers. Any article must be placed in the campfires of its identifying warriors and the walkways of its identifying open markets. Publishing an article means being able to use search engines well and with efficiency in order to place them in quality sites that identify with the intent of each article. As an ode to the Spartan war march in Thermopolis would be unacceptable in the Temple of Asclepius (god of health), so would an artic le on meditation on a site about car tires. The wisdom of where and when to voice is as essential as how to voice.
Due to the everlasting string of code and html aristocracy that rule the realm of VR, article marketing is becoming more and more intensely controlled than ever before. But control is not new to the art of Rhetoric. As early as the first bards, the need and the power of voice have been perfected over the millennia. Intent is a simple matter of directing ones passion in an empathic way, inspiring quality itself. If empathy is achieved through the art of passions, direction of the listeners experience will follow in a natural way. Choosing the proper place to publish and article can be the wisest choice when article marketing as it will determine the most ultimate power of voice audience.
Written in response to the explosion of really badly written articles on the internet. The owners of http://www.knowledge-finder.com hope this article will increase the quality of the online written word.
CGI Web Hosting - 3 Essential Scripts for your Business
By John Michaels
If there's one thing that people love it is a web site that has plenty of automated features. Sites that are highly interactive tend to get the most traffic and generate the most business for the companies that run them. Automated features can also play a "behind the scenes" role, making your site easier to use, run smoothly and allow for things like online sales and password protection. There are many ways to get this type of automation into your site, but all involve either client side or server side scripting. Scripts are written in programming languages specially designed for the web, and there are several languages that are commonly used. Most client side scripts are written in Java which is still one of the best web programming languages around. Some functions of a web site must be completed via server side scripting, however, and the most commonly used languages for server side scripting are PHP, PERL, and CGI. PHP and PERL are newer languages and are gaining a lot of popularity, but there are still plenty of features that can be scripted in the granddaddy of web scripting languages, CGI.
Shopping Carts
No online sales site would be complete without a functioning shopping cart and most of the best ones have been written in CGI script. CGI web hosting is great for shopping cart scripts because it interfaces well with most databases, including the popular MYSQL and MS Access databases, it can be utilized on Windows, UNIX, LINUX, and MACOS servers with equal ease, and can be easily configured for sales tax and shipping cost calculations. Some newer shopping cart scripts are being written in PHP and PERL, but most of the functioning carts on the web are in good old CGI web hosting scripts.
Password Protection
Many web sites require some sort of registration and entry of a password for the user to access the site's features. This is done for a number of reasons from simply a desire to track visitors for marketing purposes to allowing postings on message boards and ensuring that users have paid any required fees associated with use of the site. The automated registration process and user name/password issuance can be written with CGI scripts and many of them have been.
Form Managers
Have you ever wondered how the forms you fill out online are handled? In most cases, they're handled by CGI web hosting. When a user fills in that form and hits the "submit" button, a CGI script takes over and sends the data in email or writes it to a database where it can be accessed later by the site's administrators.
These are just a few of the uses for CGI scripts on today's web sites. There are literally hundreds of others and if there's something that can be done on a web site, it is something that can be done with CGI. PHP and PERL may be gaining a lot of popularity for various reasons, but CGI was with us first and it isn't going anywhere. As long as there are web sites, CGI web hosting will remain king.
About the Author
John Michaels is a freelance author for WebHostPacks.com where he regularly publishes articles on how to find a cheap web host and reviews of low cost web hosting services.
|