Watch out! As your site grows, it can get harder and harder to manage.
That’s what happened to me. This site has been up for over six years, and when I first started out, it was just a handful of pages, and adding one or two a week wasn’t any big deal. Of course I had to get a page design program, teach myself a bit of html and download and ftp pages to keep the site current.
Now with hundreds and hundreds of pages on the site, it’s become a website management nightware whenever site wide changes to navigation bars or products are needed. It’s long overdue for a content management system or CMS.
The beauty, for those of you who don’t know what CMS is, is that you only have to make the change to common elements in your CMS system once and it changes all the pages on your site to match. And, when you add a page or post a blog, it’s just a matter of typying it in your content, as I’m doing now, or pasting it in from your word doc.
Furthermore, there are a range of easy to use CMS systems out there. You can either set them up yourself, depending on how much time and knowledge you have, or just pay a web designer to do it for you. Should only take them a few hours and then it’s easier to use than programming your DVR.
This blog, and soon to be this whole site, is run on WordPress, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Interested in building a website or rebuilding your site to make it easier to read and easier for the search engines to rank?
Decision #1 – Want to design it yourself or have a web designer to a custom design?
If you just want to get going you can buy and add on to WordPress, Thesis or hire a Thesis designer.
That’s wouldn’t work for me, but that’s what I’d recommend for 89% of small businesses.
– Charlie
September 29th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Of course this comment is self serving, but the only problem with setting up a website that you do the building and management is that you do the building and management.
How many small business people are experts in usability, SEO and design?
Not many.
So, they spend their time working on the site instead of doing what makes them money or they do it after hours taking time away from their families.
I think contracting with a web firm to handle all the management is a better use of your time and money.
Too many really bad websites out there “just because they could”