WHAT IS WEB MARKETING?

Content Management System: What Is It?

In the past, once your static website was designed and completed, your designer would make it available on the Internet. Over time, the information would slowly become stagnant as your organization changed and improved. Any time you required the information to be updated and modified, you had to contact a web developer, wait for them to have time to make updates to your website, and then pay them for their time.

If you wanted your website to display the latest news and information about your organization, the costs quickly mounted up over the course of a year. However, this no longer needs to be the case. Today, technology has made software programs for websites that allow the end user to securely log into their website and make changes without having any prior technical knowledge. These Content Management Systems (CMS for short) can save your business both time and money.

This revolutionary new software has made it much easier to have a website that is constantly updated with the latest information about your business or organization. Not only can you update the content of your site whenever you want, but you don't have to hire someone with a special skill set to do it. You can instantly post changes to your website when they become available and you can have someone in your existing business infrastructure make the changes.

These days, CMS software has become very popular. You will be hard-pressed to find a company that isn't offering some sort of content management system with their services. The most significant problem with this is that most companies are taking the easy route and offering existing open-source CMS solutions that are freely available for download. We're not against open-source in general — in fact, our entire proprietary system is based on an open-source platform — however, there are significant business issues when it comes to open-source CMS software in particular.

Here are a few of the major problems:

1. Ease of Use

This is the biggest issue, because open-source content management systems are, for the most part, built "by programmers, for programmers". The ultimate result of this is that the end product is very technical, which makes it inaccessible and difficult to grasp for the average non-technical person.

2. Security

By its very definition, open-source is freely available to anyone. The positive side of this is that anyone can download and use it for free. The negative is that any malicious user can download the entire source code as well. Ask any security expert — or hacker, for that matter — and they will agree that having the source code of a site makes it much easier to compromise that website's security.

3. Scalability

When using an open-source software application, you have to keep in mind that it was built by a large number of programmers and not by your developer. So, when you need to extend the functionality or add something to your site, you are often dependant on what's already been developed. Since the software was not created by the company you are dealing with, they won't have the level of intimate knowledge they would if they were using software built by their own company from the ground up. This means that adding features to your website, or modifying the existing system, takes longer and results in a higher cost on your end.

We saw the value of CMS software for businesses and organizations long before it became the popular software to offer your customers. For the above mentioned reasons — and many more — when we were investigating the best CMS to offer our clients back in 2005, we decided to build our own from the ground up because of the problems with the open source options. The Interactive Web Interface, or iWi for short, was the result of that decision, and it has become one of the most powerful and easy-to-use CMS software packages available on the market today. Not only is our CMS extremely easy to use, but its proprietary source code is safe from the prying eyes of hackers. The iWi platform can be deployed rapidly and scaled / changed to meet your changing business' needs.

The iWi CMS truly puts the power of controlling your website's content into your hands. Here are some examples of the changes you will be able to make in minutes:

• Add / remove pages quickly
• Modify text in a word processor format
• Add, edit, and delete dropdown navigation
• Make unlimited backups of any page
• Save your work in progress at any time
• Easily insert hyperlinks to other pages or documents
• Simple document, image, and video uploads
• Control users and passwords

If you'd like to learn more, contact us today for a free demonstration.