Online CMS Systems

With a rapidly changing world , an abundance of information, it is a common knowledge now that all Web sites require constant updates as static content simply isn’t useful to visitors and customers.

Around-the-clock revisions of Web sites, a constant battle between technology and content management requirements and the speed at which information needs to be distributed can become easily a big challenge for large organization, and is a real burden for small and medium sized organizations and is like a real show stopper for any kind of non-profit organization.

This is why an online CMS system or a content management system that is presented to you as a service, and not as a product could be the solution of tackling the problem of an ever lasting need to manage your website content daily and the need to do this with a simple, easy to use and affordable software tool.

In contrast to more traditional Content management Systems that are known to be difficult to implement, difficult to maintain and expensive in procurement and expensive in training, the new online CMS systems are known to be easy to implement, because they do not require any installation at your premises. They also require little or no training to be used and very importantly you are paying for these systems as you use them: the more functionality you require, the more expensive the service will be and overall these software services will come at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems, not only in the procurement phase but more importantly throughout the entire life-cycle of the service.

While Web content management systems may be effective in creating, editing, managing and publishing content, they are usually costly to acquire and even more costly to own. They are therefore not well suited for medium sized organizations, small organizations, let alone non-profit organizations who have little or no access to professional IT help at a reasonable cost. Also the fact that these products run on own servers, or servers installed in a data center makes the job even more difficult, as you need to source that competence of running a website on own or hosted servers. The sole fact of running a software product and having a hardware platform to manage on top it, always comes at a serious cost.

Whereas service levels are always guaranteed with online CMS systems, they are often non-existing with traditional CMS systems, and this is very often a cause of serious debates between the IT department or IT vendors and the business owners.

But the main reason why a lot of organizations, small or big are keen to look into online CMS system or CMS systems sold as a service is the fact that the ownership of all web content and web communication, and to a certain extend all web functionality sits with the business owners or the marketing department. If you are making a brochure for your business or organization or if you are publishing a newsletter, you are not going to ask the printer to make this for you. The same applies for a web site: not the IT department will drive your web content or web communication, but the business or the core of the organization will drive this.

Therefore the basic requirements of any tool to drive your web communication should be: is the technology scalable, is it easy to manage all the content elements of my website, is it easy to manage user generated content, can I easily change the design of my website in other words can I focus all my attention on design and content, rather then on software development and hardware configuration.