Having a web presence is relatively easy and certainly valuable to businesses, organizations and even individuals. But before pulling together your website you’ll want to weigh some options.

An important tool, you should consider is a  content management system (CMS), which will allow you to control individual content pages, navigational menus, meta data and more with a simple process. Unlike updating individual files, uploading via FTP and crossing your fingers that it works properly AND looks good. This is an important development consideration prior to starting.

Second, relying on a webmaster has it’s benefits but there are some serious drawbacks, expecially when in a pinch. If you’re about to launch a marketing campaign, you have very last minute changes to a webpage but your webmaster is out…who do you call? Ghostbusters can’t help you out this time.  Teaching a few people how to make website updates makes more sense – they log into a web-based platform, make the changes/updates and publish the changes. This can save you from the potential problems of relying on one sole individual.

Third on the list is accessibility. I mentioned this a bit in the previous paragraph that a CMS is a web-based application which means you can (typically) log-in from any computer that has internet access. Even if it’s 3am on a Sunday you can make changes to your website without waiting for your webmaster to manually upload HTML files.

Not everyone will have the same needs, and in some cases, a CMS simply isn’t needed or a proper suit. Be sure to look at the options and understand the benefits of using a CMS. Contact us; we can help you determine the best route possible. And, we have CMS options to fulfill your needs…if that’s the route to take.

Despite Microsoft Word being around for a very long time, there are still issues we face when using it in conjunction with other applications. One common issue is the hidden/embedded code within a document file.

Our clients typically use Microsoft Word to provide content which would be added to their website. But, it’s not a simple copy and paste job as you’d like to think. Unfortunately MS Word can give you many more problems than you’d care to deal with simply because of the hidden code it adds when trying to copy and paste that content.

The image above is a snapshot of the code that is added to the WYSIWYG editor and unfortunately, you can only see this by viewing the HTML portion of the editor. This means that if you copy the text from Word and paste it into your CMS, there is a good chance you won’t notice this code and continue to be frustrated as you attempt to format the text.

So now you’re asking, “Why is this a problem?”. Simply put, you’ll struggle to have your content displayed the way you initially intended.

The way you can get around this issue is by using Notepad or a similar program. Copying the content from Word and pasting it into Notepad will strip all the unwanted code from the text. From there you can copy the text from Notepad and paste it into your editor/CMS. This will provide you a clean copy of the text that can be formatted properly from within the CMS. Keep in mind, when you do this you will lose all of the formatting – bold, italics, colors, etc., so keep the Word doc handy for reference.

Website content management tools have been evolving for years (and years). As we posted before, building your website on a CMS platform is an excellent choice in most cases. It is critical for our clients to update their sites constantly to keep them not only relevant, but also ahead of their competition. And, our clients are filling more roles than ever with less time, so – it better be easy to do.

Our CMS allows clients to have a custom website design, that is super-easy to update. The best part is the price. Because we didn’t re-invent the wheel when developing our CMS the development time is reasonable and so are the budgets. The technology is not proprietary, it’s based on existing open source code and widely used languages like PHP, so there are no ongoing fees or complicated hosting changes.

CGI’s CMS isn’t for every company, but its easy to use, easy to build onto and you’ll see very quickly why our clients love it.

Back in the 90’s the internet was still a new concept that a small percentage of people used for information. Those who knew basic HTML developed websites that (with today’s standards) did very little other than display text and images. Over years of new technologies and code languages we’ve evolved some simple HTML-only websites to complex, multi-language websites. Some websites are not even built using HTML or similar website specific code but instead entirely in Flash.

Those HTML websites back in the 90’s (and there are still websites today built like this, unfortunately) required you to connect to your server, find the specific file, look at the raw HTML code, make your edits, and then upload the changes. Not only was this time consuming but when you had a website with dozens of pages, it was tedious.

Over the last several years there have been many content management systems (CMS) developed and proven to make website management dramatically easier and time-friendly. Here at CGI we developed our own CMS which several clients now have their websites built upon. This enables our clients to modify their content pages, add and remove content, upload images, etc., to there own website without the hassle of using an FTP program to upload updated files to their web server.

What CMS program do you use? Why is it your CMS of choice?