Setting up a CMS (this stands for Content Management System) to enable complete management of your new website’s content, or as an add-on to and existing site, has become one of the single most popular requests for web developers these days.

And if you think about it, it really just makes a lot of sense.  Having the ability to manage your site’s content in-house—without the expense of costly web developer fees every time you want to add or edit a new page or a page’s content—is practical, efficient, and can even be fun for the person managing the content.  It definitely takes a lot of the tedious back and forth out of managing a website.

Even though the idea is to enable managing a website by nearly anyone assigned to the task—without regard to their degree of technical prowess—sometimes setting up the content management system can become a little bit too over-simplified.  Clarity and simplicity is certainly a good thing to look for in a custom-built CMS, but you still need to have a robust feature set that allows your website to hold its own in a very competitive online environment.

So here’s our essential CMS advice in this case…Make sure your CMS gives you the ability to manage your own Meta-data on every single page.

By default, our custom-built Sleepless Media CMS gives you the full ability to manage and edit each of the most important Meta-tags, including:

• Page Title
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description

The bottom line is that too many content management systems skip over this vital integration.  No matter what you might hear, having full access to customize each one of these SEO-essential Meta-tags, on each and every page of your site, is incredibly important.

It’s a well known fact that a Page Title that contains the page’s targeted keyword phrase toward the beginning of its string of words is probably the single most important on-page SEO factor you can control.  The search engines depend on this Title tag to understand your page and what it is about.

In fact, it’s so important that in most cases, the search engines will actually use the Title tag verbatim as the search listing title (the main link that you click on to visit a searched-for website within the search results when you do a search).  This is simply not a place to have an automatically-generated snippet of content inserted by default—you want to customize each page’s Title tag to contain the primary keyword phrase and encourage the searcher to click on your search listing link.

Additionally, having total control over every page’s Mega keywords and Meta description is also substantially important.  Keywords still play an understated, yet relevant role in how some search engines interpret and rank your website’s pages.  And the Meta description is very frequently used by the search engines as a part of your search listing results.  You definitely want to be able to manipulate and manage these components to help get the click and maximize your SEO efforts.

Without a CMS that enables control over every page’s Meta-tags, this is impossible.  Ensure your CMS system includes complete page-by-page Meta-data management capability.

From start to finish, there’s a lot more that goes into building a complete website than meets the eye!  To say that web design is simply a matter of designing a website leaves out a lot of the important facts.  It’s really a multi-faceted process—one that takes quality planning and expert implementation to get right.  Let’s take a look at the major components of a comprehensive web development project…

One:  Planning

First things first, every website must be carefully planned.  Here at Sleepless Media, we usually start right away when receiving a quote request.  We’ll look at all of the information provided and conceptualize a better feel for how the overall project will flow and what details will entail.  As we evaluate projects, we maintain an ongoing dialogue with our customers to ensure we completely understand the goals and gather all of the right information.

Two:  Project Management

Once the details are all rounded up and put in order, the next step is sending over a detailed formal proposal.  After an agreement is reached and the deal is inked, then it’s time to start taking care of business.  This is where it’s integral to have an efficient, organized project management system in place—without proactive project management to track and guide the web development project over each phase through realization of its full scope, there’s really very little chance of putting all of the pieces together so they actually form a desirable, high-performance finished product.  Project management is just that vital.

Three:  Copywriting

It’s always a good idea to know going into a new web development project that copywriting is one of the most essential components of a good website.  It truly is the lifeblood of the site when it comes to SEO and drawing visitors’ attention.  The thing is, it’s not automatically a part of web design (even though the best websites are designed to work hand-in-hand with their copy).  Many folks choose to supply their own site copy—we can work with this and will even be happy to give you some pointers.  We can also help you produce compelling optimized copy; just ask us about our copy and content process.

Four:  Creating The Look & Feel

This phase is the artistic process—the graphic design, if you will.  Usually done by expert professional graphic designers using industry-standard software like Photoshop, the look and feel must be both attractive and thematically appropriate for the subject of the website being designed.  The look and feel can make or break a website.

Five:  Production & Development

Once the visual design of the site is complete and agreed upon, then the next phase of the web development process is to “slice” the design.  This is kind of a reverse engineering process where the visual and style elements are broken down into optimized pieces and tied together through standards-compliant web code.  Doing this right is really an art of its own!

Six:  Web Programming

With the front-end of the website in place now, the next phase of the web development process is building the systems on the back-end that make it work.  The cogs of the machinery include E-Commerce systems, dynamic databases, and content management systems (CMS), along with other detailed programming work.

Seven:  Testing

After the programming phase is complete, all of the components are put together in their intended final form and the quality assurance phase kicks into full gear.  Extensive testing for standards, functionality, and compatibility are very important to making sure full satisfaction is met.  After all, all of the prior phases of development would go to waste if the finished product simply didn’t work right.

Eight:  Launch

Only once comprehensive testing and debugging is complete will the site be ready to launch.  But once it is, this is the most exciting part…putting your new website creation on to the web after extensive planning, development, and testing.

So, would you agree that building a great website is a little bit more detailed than just patching together some code and content and calling it finished?  It’s true—quality web development requires significant planning and preparation; but as the project wraps up, it becomes very evident that the attention to detail is definitely worth all of the effort!

WordPress seems to have become all the rage over the last year or so.  More and more businesses and organizations are turning to the open source web software platform to power their blogs and websites, and some are even using it as a full-fledged CMS (content management system).  And this is where the problem begins…

Now first things first, let’s make it clear that WordPress is pretty cool blogging software.  In fact, the blog you’re reading right this moment is powered on the back-end by WordPress.  The software was designed for blogs and it’s quite good at powering a blog with all of the right tools and features built right in.

But to use WordPress as a CMS to power an entire website—can this possibly be a good idea?  Unfortunately, the answer is, “No it’s not a very good idea at all!”

WordPress was designed to be blogging software, not CMS software.  Here are three specific examples:

1. WordPress is awfully “heavy.”

In other words, the software is loaded up with a feature set that is great for blogging.  But these features just kind of add extra baggage when it comes to using the system for CMS—they can really make a site sluggish.  Also, because of the extensive blogging feature set, the user interface is full of options and features that will only serve to confuse a CMS user whose primary goal is to add or update website content.  On the other hand, a well-designed CMS system is very clean, simple, and straightforward to use for even the novice user.

2. CMS requires more plug-ins.

To effectively use WordPress as a CMS requires the use of numerous plug-ins.  While using a couple of plug-ins is okay every once in awhile, the fact is that each different plug-in developed by different programmers with different skill sets interfaces in a different way with the blogging software and with other plug-ins that are installed.  The end result can be a compatibility nightmare—especially when a new release or update to WordPress comes out and all of the plug-in developers must scramble to get a new plug-in version together to be compatible.  We won’t even mention the plethora of potential security issues that arise from this scenario.

3. It’s not designed to organize large amounts of information.

Because WordPress was designed primarily to be blog software, it does great with categories and tags—the foundation of blog organization.  The problem with using it as a CMS for a larger website lies in the fact that it depends on the installed theme to establish a proper website navigation structure, and most available CMS themes just don’t handle the task very well at all.  Although it’s the standard for blogs, using time-based content presentation (where newest content forces older content down the list into obscurity) is not a good way to organize most website content.

Sure, go ahead and use WordPress to power your blog (or the blog portion of your website).  This is exactly what it was designed to do, and it works great for this purpose.  But be aware of its pitfalls and limitations before planning to deploy the popular blogging software as a full-fledged CMS.

It’s hard to believe that 2009 is drawing to a close already.  Time flys, and so do plans to grow and improve websites and online marketing plans.  The good news is that with the fresh start of a new year, you can start anew with making improvements to your websites at the same time and not have to feel overwhelmed.  Keeping this in mind, here are just a few small—but effective—ways to improve your website in 2010.

Upgrade to more professional web hosting. Few realize it before making the upgrade, but the bargain-rate shared hosting services that many sites utilize can really adversely effect site performance and search engine performance.  Moving your site to a better web hosting package can be just the performance boost you’ve been seeking—and the price could possibly even be less than you’re paying now.

Continue to expand your social networking efforts. If 2009 was the year of Facebook and Twitter really going mainstream, then just imagine what 2010 will bring for social networking!  The benefits of using social networking to drive traffic to your website are undeniable.  If you’ve already begun, then by all means—keep it up!  And if not, don’t worry…it’s not too late to get started now.  Just try not to put it off until the next new year rolls around.

Integrate CMS into your website. Have a great website already, but beginning to get tired of having to pay the pros every time there’s a small content update to make to the site?  If this sounds all-too-familiar, adding a CMS (content management system) will be the improvement of the year for you.  It’s simply a system that enables you to log in and make content edits and additions with a few simple clicks.  Cost savings and time savings from CMS really add up quickly!

Improve your existing website copy. Speaking of adding and editing your website’s copy, have you given this much thought since first developing your website?  It’s important to keep your website’s written content fresh, accurate, and up-to-date.  After all, visitors and search engines alike practically demand it.

Beef up your site’s security. With a seemingly ever-growing onslaught of security exploits to worry about, web users these days are becoming more and more conscious and wary about what sites they visit and how they transmit information on the web.  Regardless of if your website is e-Commerce enabled or not, you still need to do frequent security audits on your site to make sure your visitors are receiving a safe experience.  Making sure your security certificates are all up to date is just one such example in this department.

Develop an organic SEO development plan. Ready to start improving your website’s organic SEO so you don’t have to spend so much on PPC and other costly paid online marketing promotions in 2010?  Well, the good news here is that it’s simpler than ever to improve your site with quality organic search optimization.  Here are a few SEO pointers to help you get started.  And by laying out a solid plan at the beginning of the year, and working diligently to implement it accordingly, you might even be surprised at how simple, affordable, and downright effective it can be!

Let 2010 be the year that you take your website and your business to the next level (and know that we’re here to help you when you need it).  Wishing you all of the best in the New Year!

Having a good user-friendly content management system (CMS) installed as part of your next website project is a great idea.  After all, just think of all of those times when you’ve needed to make an update or add a new piece of content to your company or organization’s website—and had to call up your web designer to do it!

This doesn’t have to be the case any longer.  Having an easy-to-use CMS system built into your website makes it possible for an authorized user to log right in from practically any web connected device and make the changes required, no matter how small (or large) they happen to be.

The best part?  Well, besides instantaneous updates to your site, there’s also the fact that with CMS, you won’t need to pay an hourly web designer rate for basic content changes any longer.

So that’s the easy part, but there’s a little bit more to the story…

Once you’ve decided that adding CMS is right for your site, it’s time to consider the options.  For instance, there are very expensive commercial CMS systems that can be installed.  Better yet, there are a couple of fairly decent open-source CMS systems out there.  But the best option, for a multitude of reasons we’ll take a look at in just a second, is creating a custom-programmed CMS system that’s built specifically for your website and your unique content management needs.

Why should you seriously consider a custom built CMS?

At Sleepless Media, we build fully custom content management systems.  There are several clear benefits to going this route.  Here are just a few of them:

• With custom-built CMS, we’ll custom program the entire setup so it works exactly how you need your site to work. Your needs come first and the system is developed to match…not the other way around.

• Custom developed CMS is simply more secure. With scripts that can be purchased off-the-rack, as well as with open-source options, there’s a serious problem lurking just beneath the surface—practically everyone, including the “bad guys,” has access to the code (and therefore the ability to hack it).  This is not the case with rock-solid, securely built custom CMS.

• A surprise to many, it’s actually faster (and less expensive) for us to create a custom CMS solution from scratch. Think about it for a minute; by working with clear objectives from the very beginning, we’re able to program the solution from the ground up in a streamlined fashion.  Compare this to using an existing open source CMS, where we’d have to completely unbuild it, modify it to suit your needs, and then put it all back together again.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

The bottom line is that it’s easier for us, and much more straightforward, to develop a solution from the ground up instead of trying to reverse engineer and re-purpose applications that our programmers might not be all that familiar with.  Less training, less time, less cost, and a much more functional end product…choosing expertly custom developed content management systems is the way to go!

What is Sleepless CMS?

It’s Sleepless Media’s exclusive Content Management System that we customize from the ground up for all of our CMS projects. Our content management system works perfectly for exactly what YOUR website does. We build it around your website’s needs and functionality, as opposed to trying to stuff your website into an “off-the-shelf” CMS like Drupal, Mambo or Joomla.

Every content-managed website is different, and so is every Sleepless CMS job we do.

Contact us if you have questions or need more information.