Your web site is your online ‘brand’. Because it is so unique people will find it and it all boils down to tags, keywords and other complicated technical stuff that the majority of computer users don’t know about.

When deciding about your web site your statement of purpose should consist of the goals you are setting for the evolution of your site, share these with your professional web design consultant and you will get anything but a basic, the same as everyone else type website.

There are many benefits to any business having a web site, and it is true, anyone can throw a website together if you follow the directions on a typical web site build it yourself style, you don’t have to do much, but then following that trend your web site won’t do much either.

A brilliant, informative web site full of expectations and great information, superb graphics and user friendly, easy access information will keep them coming back. There is much to consider when deciding on a domain name. It should be catchy but reflect your business or purpose, not lengthy, and there are rules to follow, these are best left to your designer. However, what you want for content is left up to you. In order for your designer to build a good flowing, understandable and interesting site they need to have good flowing, understandable and interesting content.

Ongoing maintenance is all important otherwise your prospective clients lose interest and go looking elsewhere, this is another reason your site must be upbeat and professional as well as completely unique. If you have the ability, it is often wise to hire a webmaster to maintain your site, that doesn’t mean they have to sit in your office, it means that from wherever they work they will take care of your site. This is all part of selling your business, an important part because this is where the majority of your customers will come from.

If you own a business, all social media is good and very useful.  If you know how to manipulate the thousands of sources, it is even better, and there are experienced individuals and businesses that can help with that.

Companies that know all the in’s and out’s that ‘us others’ don’t understand, have experienced personnel trained to take care of your needs.  With all the social media avenues online, your business could be showcased to thousands of potential clients.  Such places as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the most popular and millions of people could check out your site.

It is always advisable, when building a business website, to include these forms of social media and add links, also all the pertinent information about you and your company will be displayed there, so make it inviting and tempting encouraging people to visit.

If you want to keep track of your visitors, you can invite them to register with your site, as you maintain updates you can then inform your registered members and send them a link to the latest information on your site.

Social media doesn’t only include internet, though historical as it might seem, newspaper advertising, advertising on the local “Coffee News” and such, can also be just as lucrative.  It is important in this case to include your website URL and your email address.   Keeping track of who comes to your site from which media could be important to your client list, for instance if you are getting more response from the newspaper then you should put more into that avenue of advertising.

If you find your internet marketing isn’t working so well, then you need to revamp your approach, and many social media sources can help with this.  Maybe you need to use a different theme or rewrite the content.   Adding Google Adwords and other such media to your site, include associates and link backs to your site from other reputable sites in return putting a reciprocating link on your site.

There are many sources of social media, and if you know how, you can make use of them all or call on your specialist.

For all our WordPress users, please remember to update to WordPress 3.3 that was just released. It should be a quick 1-click process in your dashboard, and nobody have an excuse not to do so.

It’s more secure and will surely provide a better publishing experience!

Most people think of a Content Management System (CMS) as a tool to create, edit and publish content on the fly. That’s true, but a CMS is not just limited to that. We are increasingly coming across people and organisations who use the wrong type of CMS, or simply haven’t chosen the best CMS that fits their requirements. I have listed below the top 10 points to consider when choosing the right CMS.

1. Meeting Requirements

This is the most important point to consider when choosing your perfect CMS. What do you need to accomplish with your new CMS? Do you want to publish your personal blog, setup an online shop, make a community website, or build a local news portal? Each CMS is built with core functionalities, and most of these support third party plugins. Look for a CMS that matches your requirements most with it’s core functionalities, because that is where the strength of a CMS is.

2. Backend Admin Panel

A backend admin panel is a place from where you manage your CMS. And that’s the reason it plays an important role. Make sure your backend admin panel is organised and is not confusing. Make sure it differentiates between your menus and your links, your pages and your posts, in a way you can understand easily. Everything in your admin panel needs to be grouped appropriately, under clear headings, the less time it takes to figure how to manage your content from the admin panel, the more time you have to actually do it!

3. Community and Support

Another key factor in choosing a CMS is the level of user base and support documentation that is available when using your CMS. The more support you get from the community, the more time and money you save. Make sure the developers of the CMS are available for help via support pages and community forums. If not, atleast the CMS should have a large user base so that you can support from the fellow users of the CMS via forums. Another advantage of having a large community, is that developers play a big role in it, and if there is a high number of developers in the community, you can take advantages of a high number of plugins and modules available for free.

4. Managing Assets

A good CMS provides options of managing your images, styles, documents and other files supporting various formats and organising them according to their use on the website. With these options available, it takes less time to build features like a photo gallery, video page, portfolio etc in pretty quick time. This might not be as important as other factors, but it is absolutely crucial in some cases.

5. Customisation and Modularity

This is another very important element to consider when employing a CMS. How easy it is to customise it to your requirements in terms of design and functionality? How easy it is to build modules on top of the core functionality to achieve certain specific goals. A good CMS naturally supports both customisation and building modules and is very adaptable in that sense.  The CMS should not how your content is presented, it is you who should dictate the CMS to present the content in any way you like. Avoid CMS you can’t build on even if it meets more requirements with it’s core functionality than other CMSs.

6. Accessibility and Ease of Use

A CMS should naturally be easy to use and generate pages that have valid code and meet accessibility cretieria. If your website requires your users to interact on your website, they should know how to without being explained about it. It should provide you the tools with which you can put emphasis or focus on a certain products or pages on your website. If these tools are available, they should be self-explanatory too.

7. Fast Loading and Search Engine Friendly

Your CMS should be able to render pages that load quickly and should allow search engine friendly URLs along with some degree of SEO. That is vital to retaining the interest of your viewers and well as search engine robots. Fast loading pages often retain the interest of the viewers, and some CMSs support caching modules or plugins to help load pages quicker. This is a very handy feature and is used extensively by users of all the CMSs that support it. SEO is another factor to consider, but almost all well known CMSs provide generic SEO options.

8. Multiple Websites and Language support

These days it is vital for global organisations to create multiple websites with different content or create different language versions of the same website. Both are generally facilitated by CMSs that support publishing multiple websites (with same or different design) via a single installation. If you want to implement multiple language support on your CMS driven website, this has to be on your list!

9. Development Budget and Costs

This can be defined as the sum total of other factors. Since time is money, you need to look for a CMS that meets most of your requirements and after all the design, development and customisation, meets all your requirements while keeping in line with your budget. Generally, if you employ a lesser known CMS, chances are that the development costs wil be very high and the plugins or modules will not be available for cheap either, let alone be free of cost!

10. Easy to Backup and Upgrade

Usually, people ignore this element, which reflects in the number of requests we get to backup and upgrade our clients’ CMSs. Even upgrading some well known CMSs is a huge task, involving time consuming steps like using separate databases for new and old versions of the CMS, and some of the functionality via plugins/modules get lost of misconfigured. Do your research, make sure the CMS you employ is easy to upgrade and there is appropriate documentation available covering all the steps involved in the process of upgrading your CMS.

Conclusion

While there is no perfect CMS for all needs, you should be able to find a CMS that is the most suited to your requirements. The above mentioned rules will help you do just that. I have listed only the top ten factors according to me. Other factors to consider are: User Permissions, WYSIWYG Editor, Search Functionality and Licensing (Open Source?). Some of the most popular CMS applications are listed below. Choose wisely!

• Joomla — content management system
• Drupal — content management system
• TYPO3 — content management system
• WordPress — the most popular blog software and content management system
• Magento — ecommerce CMS
• osCommerce — ecommerce CMS
• Zen Cart — ecommerce CMS

Reload Web endorses Open Source Software!

It is hated by web designers, developers and users alike, we all think the world is better off without it, and now Microsoft wants us to forget it too! Seems like a desperate move from the software giant to have launched the IE6 Countdown website, but a good move too, in my opinion.

“10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.”
… says the website on it’s homepage. Writing CSS for IE6 makes me cringe, and like me, all the web designers would be glad to see the back of it. Personally, I would add IE7 to that list as well.

The website recommends an upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, but I would personally recommend using non-Microsoft browsers any day. I use Google Chrome for browsing because of it’s speed and Mozilla Firefox for designing because of Firebug, and all others just for testing purposes.

If you want to share your opinion or pay your condolences to IE6, please use the comments form below.

Hello friends!

We are proud to launch the official website of Reload Web (http://reloadweb.co.uk). Reload Web brings you quality web design, development, CMS development and integration, WordPress and Joomla development, SEO and Social Media Marketing at affordable prices.

My name is Mohsin and I will be occasionally posting messages to you on this blog.

A big THANKS to all of you for reading this and supporting Reload Web!