"Never trouble another for what you can do yourself." -Thomas Jefferson and Web Design

In his letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith in 1825, Thomas Jefferson included the following two items in his Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life:

• "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
• "Never trouble another for what you can do yourself."

Just as with our friend Confucius, TJ's wisdom applies to your business web presence.

In web context the translation is this: Eliminate the bottlenecks that slow down and reduce efficiency in your web content publishing process. i.e. : reduce unneeded expenses of both time and resources.

Everyone is a content contributor—or needs to be. Why send word processor documents to a webmaster for translation to "Internet language,"  when you can handle most of the work yourself in your content management system (CMS) , having authors self publish? Yes, there are times when you might want the kind of relationship with your webmaster where he does certain things for you that you could do yourself.  However, if someone's time is more valuable spent programming and working on databases and web servers than acting as an administrative assistant, shouldn't you strive to work that way?

With CMS, you can often publish web information as easily as you can write it on a word processor. That's the kind of process CDLLC implements, and you should ask us how simple it would be for us to do it for you.

Save time. Increase efficiency. Save money. Make your life and those of the people you work with easier and more satisfying.

Or just keep throwing away money instead; your choice.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

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

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

CMS is a Beautiful Thing, or Confucianism Part IV

"Good people distinguish things in terms of categories and groups."

In prior Confucianism-inspired posts, we talked about the benefits of using Content Management (CMS) at your website. We've made the case for organizing, ordering, and arranging web pages, so now onto breaking bottlenecks in controlling costs and maintaining efficiency while moving forward with today's standards. With navigation management addressed, here are some other bottlenecks that we eliminate by using a CMS:

1) Without CMS, each time you redesign the website look-and-feel you create a need for extensive programming. This becomes both a people management and a cost issue.
2) Now add the need for multiple contributing editors/authors having to get their content to a "webmaster," and costs explode. Again.
3) Adding functionality, like forms, e-commerce, and online payment? More programming and webmaster skills get added, too. A CMS reduces the costs associated with these—tremendously.

CMS makes life easier by separating/disentangling content editing, copy writing, and navigational elements of your web site, design, and functionality.

1) Design becomes a separate module- a wrapper for the web pages. With CMS you change this design wrapper in one place, and the changes take effect globally throughout every page of the website.
2) As many content editors as you need can login, protect pages, and change just the content they're responsible for without the risk of breaking the design.
3) Applications that "do stuff" are programmed and arranged independently, so modification and re-programming creates no risk to the rest of the website.
4) And while we've already mentioned this, it bears repeating for the cost savings it brings you: changing the order and hierarchy of the navigational links becomes as simple as making a few clicks with a mouse.

Sounds almost like magic, right? With a CMS, the magic comes from putting all your stuff inside a database, grouped and categorized with an eye toward Internet presentation as needed to suit your company's needs relative to customers, vendors, employees, and whomever else stumbles upon it. The pieces are stored separately so they don't get entangled with one another, and "global site elements", like search engine META tags, polls, online payment, and sign-up forms are all grouped separately so changes to them only have to be made once!

And with a database, EVERYTHING is easier to categorize and group. For example, if you set up and write an FAQ section and it grows unwieldy, it's stored in the database so modification of the Q&A is a snap.

CMS is all about simplicity. How much so? Let's take our buddy's words, and summarize them as though he was hosting a radio program, circa 2010:

Confucius, out. (thanks, Ryan Seacrest!)

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

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

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Dude!

Finding and configuring a good multi-post tool, like http://ping.fm / http://posterous.com, is like a full-time job!

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

From Web Pages to Web Sites, or Confuciansim Part III

"Good people order and arrange" Had enough Confucius yet? 'Cause that old dude had the Internet pegged! http://cdllc.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-web-pages-to-web-sites-or.html

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

Planning Your Business Web Presence, or Confucianism Part II

"Study the Past if You Would Divine the Future" - Confucius. http://ping.fm/N3Pqb

Posted via web from crockettdunn's posterous

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