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What Your Website Should Consist Of……(at the very minimum)
- CMS – There’s this long debate amongst members of the web design community about whether or not the implementation of a content management system (CMS) as the de-facto standard is really a good thing. The Internet Marketing Platinum team have taken lots of time to mull this one over and have reached a decision about what is the best way forward and we’ve decided that most, yes most, websites should have a CMS. This is partly or even mainly because businesses do change and evolve and adapt and new staff join and some of these new staff may want to actually update the website without web development software such as Dreamweaver. It is fair to say that on deployment CMS training may, in the main, fall on deaf hears. Clients forget how to update their CMS. Retraining sessions take place. The designated website content writer is then drafted in to make the next set of quarterly website amendments but, again, forget how to login and administer the CMS that is provided. What a mess! Wasted resources with the CMS implementation, training and, even, the actual time taken to make the changes by novice to intermediate users. So why not just do away with CMSs altogether and outsource the task of website updates to your web developers in the first instance? Why not indeed. But having a CMS bolted onto your website (or, more realistically, built into the underpinning web architecture) has become a standard of web design and it does make good commercial sense for web designers and web developers to offer a CMS or ‘the ability to update your own website’ to all of their clients. CMSs have evolved and are much better these days anyway which less chance of breaking code and causing other undesirable anomalies.
- Branding – It drives us mad when web design companies agree to go with a poor brand and don’t even attempt to change a client’s mind. We’ve seen it all. Terrible logos, meaningless and ill-conceived strap lines and a plethora of other nasties. Hey Mr. Web Designer…it’s your job to consult on what’s advisable…so advise! OK if you’ve advised on a better way forward but your client still won’t listen then it’s your choice about whether to continue with the project or even ask them to use another web design agency and at least impart your professional opinion to them.
- Web Hosting – OK I didn’t mean that every website must have web design, of course they must. I meant that they need reliable and fast web hosting and it must be backed up on a regular basis so that you don’t lose your web files in case disaster occurs.
- Promotion – I’ve purposefully not just dropped in SEO here. Promotion is the word that I’ve used because SEO isn’t necessarily the only thing that you could be doing to promote your website and business. Also, some people actually use SEO as a term that contradicts its actual purpose. We want targeted traffic to our websites and we want this to be achieved in an ethical and organic way.
