A Professional Website You Can Update Yourself
Written by Guest Blogger Katie Woods
Many clients and communities we partner with to design and develop websites want the ability to update and edit the site themselves. While there are many “do-it-yourself” website tools that allow you to create and maintain your own site from inception, building a website from scratch can be overwhelming to most people. Luckily, Red Sage uses tools that allows for the best of both worlds.
THE BENEFITS OF CMS
The majority of the websites we develop are built using Joomla, a leading open source content management system (CMS). We use Joomla because it allows us to provide great interactive applications to our customers without a huge programming cost. Like the iPhone, Joomla allows literally thousands of application “plug-ins” to extend the functionality of a site in various ways. As an open source program, Joomla has a team of contributors that work together to continuously improve the program, ensuring that it remains current. Having been in existence since 2000, Joomla now has over 200,000 community users and contributors. Red Sage Web Projects Coordinator Teresa Smith is an active Joomla contributor, regularly attending the Joomla World Conference and providing feedback to Joomla developers. Her knowledge of Joomla paired with the design skills of Mark and Lauren produce beautiful websites with lots of built-in functionality.
YOU CAN DO IT
By using a CMS system, we can give the option for clients like you to maintain your site if you prefer. The great benefit of using a CMS is that it requires very little technical knowledge to manage your own site. In fact, many of the editing tools in a CMS site look just like the tools in Word. The benefit to this system is that you don’t have to be a programmer to be able to update your site. We build all of the pages according to currently accepted best practices for web development, then train you to maintain them.
SHOULD I MAINTAIN MY WEBSITE?
There are definite positives to maintaining your own website; however, there are a few things to consider before taking on the website maintenance yourself:
- Consider whether you have the right staffing to be able to handle the updates. We recommend training two permanent staff members with basic computer skills to maintain the site. This prevents a loss of knowledge in case of turnover and helps keep one person from becoming overwhelmed by the updates.
- Consider whether you will have enough web updates to make it worth your time to do them in-house. Depending on how often you plan to update your site, you could be requesting a significant amount of time investment for training on the front-end for minimal upkeep later. Most users do not need to make major changes to their site regularly. (This would not be the cases for frequent changes including regular blog postings.)
Site maintenance is a great fit for many clients with a dedicated staff person(s) and regular site changes. The good news is that with Red Sage, you can choose to maintain your website in-house, or you can have us take care of it for you.
THE NEXT LEVEL
Regardless of whether you decide to maintain the site yourself or let Red Sage handle maintenance temporarily or permanently, there are many benefits to partnering with a team of web professionals. In addition to the programming knowledge needed to build and test a new site, you have the benefit of a team of designers and strategic marketers to give expert advice on SEO, site navigation, images, graphics, messaging, and content. If you are ready for a site that stands out from the crowd, but is maintained from your office, let us know.