How to Increase Productivity and Lower Costs with your Website
Written by Smartt Team on October 4, 2009
Websites can be a drain on company resources. For the most part websites are difficult to maintain and update especially for companies that aren’t in the tech industry. Traditionally, having a website has required that you also have a webmaster who is in charge of updating and maintaining the site.
The problem with this model is that everything must go through the webmaster. If you need to make a change to your site, no matter how small it is, you have to contact your webmaster and tell them what to do. Depending on their workload, it could take up to a week or more before the changes are made. Not only is this inefficient and a waste of time, but it also costs money. Webmasters aren’t cheap. They know that most people don’t possess the necessary technical knowledge to maintain their websites themselves so they can charge large amounts of money and companies pay because there’s no other choice.
Take Control of Your Website
But there is a choice. You don’t have to rely on a webmaster. In fact, you can increase productivity by eliminating the need for the middleman. Up until this point your webmaster has been the link between your ideas and your website. Cutting out the middleman will save you not only time but money as well.
The answer lies in the way you manage the content of your site. Using a content management system (CMS) completely eliminates the need for a webmaster while enhancing the integrity of your site.
Increase Productivity
A CMS is a website creation application that allows anyone to update the site with little or no technical knowledge. CMS’s are designed with the user in mind and for that reason they are easy to use, update and maintain. On the backend, the CMS is designed like a simple word processor. This simplicity allows anyone to add, edit and remove content with a few clicks.
Instead of writing the content, submitting it to the webmaster and waiting for him to add it to the site, you can upload content instantly yourself. As soon as a change needs to be made, it can be. Content management systems are web-based applications so any user can update the site from anywhere that has an internet connection.
Lower Costs
Since content management systems allow you to update your website yourself, you will save money on the maintenance of the site. There is a one-time fee associated with the set up of your site. This charge includes the costs of creating the design theme of your site, setting up the navigation tree, configuring the way pages are displayed and formatted and also the customizing the site branding with your own logo.
After the initial set up charges, there are no other fees associated with your website. Ever. Because you can update, maintain and edit the site yourself, you no longer need to pay someone else to do it for you. If you want to add images, you can do it through the CMS; if you want to add music, video or other multimedia, you can also do that through the CMS.
Adding pages is simple as well. The look at feel of your site is contained within the code of the CMS so any time you add a page the integrity of the site is maintained. Everything stays the same from page to page, which makes for a consist website, no matter what you decide to add to it in the future. By simply switching over to a CMS you will add value to your company by increasing productivity and lowering costs for the maintenance of your website.
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