Empower Web clients, Increase your profits

Static Websites, Static Content In the early days of websites and webdesign, if (when) there was a need to change, add or modify published information on a clients website we'd get a call (or email) from the client with a markup of proposed changes. Simple stream of workflow, Client to us, us to web. Dynamic Websites, Fluid Content The days of static HTML pages has pretty much passed, and that's a good thing. Today, there's a much greater amount of, and need for "fluid content" on the web... Targeted "fresh" information is today's asset, and web-enabled business needs the abilty to keep that content current and relevant. Here's where content management comes in... Real-World Business uses Content Management The working model for just about any conventional business with more than one employee already uses a content management structure in real-world, day to day business. As an example (unless you are a sole proprietor), when your company sells a product or gets an order; * You get a paper trail upstream from sales * Revisions and approvals are made by you (or lower management) and are passed back downstream to sales and accounting. Your employees don't physically move walls, change or add doorways or build new additions to the building, they work only with assets, not the physical structure of your business. Employees + Inventory = Yes Employees + Building = No Same Story, Different Media Online Content Management works along similar veins by assigning administrative priorities and permissions to all content data available on your website. This structure enables anyone with permission to access, modify and add content to your website within administration guidelines without the need to change global website structure. Content can be anything you currently publish or would like to publish on your website; inventory (catalog/e-store), articles and business information are all considered content assets. Separation of Church and State The real strength behind most content management applications isn't the ease of content manipulation but rather, the complete separation of the "content" layer from the "application" layer. In the old days, when we developed a static website, content and interface were assembled together, page by page. Client content (articles, pictures and business information) were designed around navigation menus and the internal structure of the website, therefore, each time we were asked to make a substantial change to the clients content, someone here had to go under the client's hood and change or modify the application layer to reflect the new additions. On some the large sites, changing or adding a menu item or new content section required hand-coding hundreds of pages and took days, sometimes weeks. Billable yes, cost efficient to client, no... From a design shop standpoint, static content maintenance was not even marginally profitable. That