You need to update your website regularly so that your customers keep coming back to your website. Can you update your website by yourself or still depending on your web development company to do it for you? Content management is effectively complete control over text, images and graphics within your website, but there are many other features available such as the ability to implement flash animations and rich media content.

What is content? In the context of Content management system (CMS), content is what you put into the system, this might include documents, images, audio / video, flash animation, graphs, spreadsheets and presentations.

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What is a Content management solution? Content management solutions are largely seen as being a web publishing tools or environments which enable a range of content to be easily published to the web, and for that content to be organised and managed in a coherent and effective way. A content management solution will provide a user interface so that the content producer can concentrate on adding, updating and maintaining the content while the design layout can be controlled by the designers. And so the technical standards and requirements for the platform to appear and function properly are the responsibility of people with the relevant IT skills, whilst the content producer may have very limited IT skills. The content management system should enable any specified user the ability to author specific daily content and media for their website without having to learn or consider the underlying technologies or programming languages. In practice, it should be as easy for an author to publish to the web as it is writing and saving an MS Word document. Another advantage is the ability to setup quality control and create workflows and assigning various different people with the responsibilities of authors, editors and publishers.

When do you need CMS solution? If you want to reduce website maintenance costs? If you want to increase the responsiveness of your website to your business needs? If you want to reduce the risks of out dated or misleading information on your website?

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Why is CMS different? Quick Implementation – The current solution along with its value added services and features are geared to meet up to 95% of any customer's requirements. You can have a comprehensive dynamic website with tailor made interfaces managed by our CMS solution, get you up and running on the internet within weeks. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – reduced annual maintenance contracts as well as negligible cost of managing the web site for keeping the site updated Vendor Independence – Manage and keep the web site updated yourself. WYSIWYG based site administration console – can be managed by even the least technical resource in your organization Scalable Technology and Modular Architecture – we can build any custom application or work flows over the core application to meet the requirements of your organization Available Anywhere Anytime – ISHIR CMS will be online along with your website. Now you can manage your website from any PC anywhere. All you need is internet connection.

Advantages of a content management solution A content management system will be driven by a database such as Microsoft SQL and it will produce the website in a dynamic, flexible way. There are many advantages to this, such as elements of the site may be generated dynamically, where one content item such as an article about a product may be dependant on the product actually existing within the system and if the product is removed, so is the connected article. This effectively removes dead-ends within the system. A quality content management solution can have other dynamic abilities such as allowing authors to generate dynamic polls and surveys and easily capture and publish the results. Content management solutions can also be configured so that the user can personalise their experience of using your particular site, also you may want to have a website where the vast majority of the content is accessible to everyone, but you may want users to register to view other content or services. This may be access to discussion groups or forums, classified adverts or the ability to add information to the system as a registered user.

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What content administration features should the CMS feature? A content management solution can be administrated in several different formats, the most conventional is to use a ‘template' format, this allows users to modify each page within restricted areas, so if a page was made up of a paragraph on the left and a photograph on the right, within the administration they would have a text entry box in the area where the text was and a control for changing or adding the image to the right. This works well if the page design layout doesn't need to be changed but can be quite restrictive if the administrator requires more control such as the ability to add an addition image or object to the page. A advanced content management solution will contain a ‘rich text editor' format which was made possible by the advent of the Microsoft .NET programming language as it allowed many more features and controls which were much more difficult to develop using conventional technologies. The rich text editor gives the administrator complete control over page content and design, incorporating many controls found in packages such as MS Word along with the ability to use drag and drop absolute positioning to move text, images, objects and rich media content such as audio and video presentations to any location within a page.

Can other employees use the content management solution? A content management solution may enable the administrator(s) of the system to create additional authors but only allow them access to edit certain areas, this can be highly effective as for example a company press officer can be given access to update the website news area, or the management team can be given access to update the company mission statement. There should be no limit on the amount of users that can be created, allowing the administrator(s) to create the perfect workflow and ensure that the website is being maintained by the correct members of staff within the organisation.

Content management solutions and search engine promotion Online website promotion can be a very time consuming exercise, a lot of work usually has to go into the meta tag generation and site content to ensure that you will get listed. This has always traditionally been the job of the website development company or search engine specialist. A quality content management solution should have built in functionality to cover all aspects of search engine promotion such as the ability to create and modify the title, description and keywords meta tags for each page. There are also other areas to consider like the ability to create ALT tags for any images within the site, especially the homepage as certain engines such as Google now read these.

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