“Good people order and arrange”

Had enough Confucius yet? ‘Cause that old dude had the Internet pegged!

Remember the days of the coal-and-steam-powered internet, when you had to walk miles in the snow to a university to make changes to your website, and ration your disk space usage because there wasn’t enough to go around?

Ah, sweet memories. Your personal “Home Page.” Your Corporate “Home Page.” Build it once and it’ll last years . . . just like a when-the-heck-did-they-last-change-that-thing old billboard!

Guess what? They don’t make ’em like they used to, and you can’t build ’em the way you used to.

That shoddy billboard became the cover page for a leaflet, as you created specialized pages with unique information to grab peoples’ interest. And yep: that Web PAGE became . . . a Web SITE!

Content multiplies. Suddenly there are more pages, more information, more content that needs to be grouped and arranged according to context.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? It can be. Without site management tools, or a Content Management System, whenever the hierarchy of the web pages changes, a new navigational menu needs to be programmed. And today a good website has to change fast. Monthly, weekly, even daily, depending on your objective and audience.

This is not your father’s shoddy old billboard.

One (huge) benefit of building your site on a Content Management System is the automation of menu creation. Manually programming a navigational menu on every one of those pages becomes a thing of the past. And you can even make the changes yourself, easily, using a method that feels just like using a word processor.

Ordering, arranging, re-ordering, re-arranging, it’s all simple.

So why aren’t you using a CMS ? It probably comes down to inertia. Your old, billboard-style web site is good enough for your needs.

Maybe, but that’s becoming a less-and-less valid way to look at doing business on the Internet. No, you may not need an e-commerce system, because not everybody “sells stuff” online. But if your web site is to be worth any more than your “when-the-heck-did-I-last-use-one, anyway?” business cards, you need more. And without a CMS in place, you’re making your job harder, and more expensive.

And that old billboard? You know how you laugh every time you pass it and wonder why its owner doesn’t update it? Case closed.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services