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Intro to DotNetNuke

by on Nov 07, 2008 (0) Comments

DotNetNuke – another powerful content management system to add to the existing list. With so many CMS’s around and each one of them offering you a vast set of features, you feel pampered. A few years back, building your dream website for your organization and managing its content simultaneously, seemed such a daunting task. However after Content Management Systems have come into existence, publishing dynamic content in a consistently structured and customized manner has been astonishingly simplified.

With over 500,000 registered users and 5.0 million downloads in late 2007 (as per official sources), DotNetNuke has become one of today’s largest and effective open source CMS. It has been written in Microsoft’s VB.NET for the ASP.NET (also by Microsoft) framework. With an extensible core and a set of additional customization features that include modules and skins, DotNetNuke can be used to develop, deploy and efficiently manage websites, including extranets and intranets.

Another Intro to Sitecore

by on Oct 29, 2008 (0) Comments

Content Management Systems are everywhere. Marketing analysts, subject matter experts and website administrators are all switching over to CMSs in unison for a lucid separation of presentation from content on their website and/or web service, with more control on the latter. This in turn facilitates reduced IT expenditures for your organization, ensures steady yet consistent content life cycle management and streamlines the target audience to desired areas. Sitecore is one such flexible CMS that seems to fit the above requirements.

Sitecore is based on the .NET technology. Setting up and deploying Sitecore is quite straightforward and you can get started with creating your new website rightaway. Sitecore is totally committed to the .NET framework and hence provides regular stable releases and updates thus complimenting the latest releases of .NET, Visual Studio, SQL server and Windows server.

Intro to Umbraco

by on Oct 28, 2008 (1) Comments

With a plethora of Content Management Systems available today, it becomes very difficult to choose form one of them. As a matter of fact, the CMS that you would choose would also depend on the architecture or the platform where you would deploy your project. Having discussed on the Joomla CMS which is based on PHP and MySql, it is now time to review the Umbraco CMS that is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology. Well, this one is for the .NET fans. The entire source of the CMS has been written in C# and is available for the developers to download and modify for free. Yes, Umbraco is open source.

You do not require beforehand knowledge of Microsoft’s .NET framework or C# in particular, to get started with the Umbraco CMS. All you would need is Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) server, where you would host and deploy your website.

Intro to Joomla

by on Oct 27, 2008 (0) Comments

We had earlier discussed on the utility of MooTools and JQuery as compact, JavaScript frameworks for rapid, client side code development. While on the one hand having a website with a professional “look and feel”, sliding menus and fade in/out effects will definitely add a competitive edge, however, on the other hand, what about its content?

You need to have your website content updated regularly if you want your visitors to keep visiting your website. This may be easy as it seems, but imagine a situation where regular updating of content may overload the server with information that might be quite cumbersome for you to manage. This is where the need for a Content Management System (CMS) arises and Joomla is one such CMS tool, that we shall be discussing here. Whether you are a professional web designer, delivering high end service oriented websites to your clients or a naive user, just starting off to develop your own personal website with minimal programming knowledge, Joomla can assist you in more ways than one to publish as well as manage the content of your website, right from the word “go”.

Intro to Sitecore

by on Oct 10, 2008 (2) Comments

Unlike many content management systems which maintain content in a haphazard manner, Sitecore maintains data in a structured content tree.

Data is represented as items. These items of different types are combined in a tree structure such that an item can have a parent and child items.

Templates are like Object Oriented Classes. A template contains fields that contain the actual content for an item. An item is an instance of a template just as an Object is an instance of a class. A template can have a “Master” which is used to create an item of a template. A master plays the same role as an Object Oriented Constructor. Masters can be configured to specify default values for fields and can specify sub-items that should be created when an item is first created. Templates can be based on other templates and inherit their fields, much like Object Oriented inheritance.

How To Walk A Mile In A Search Engine’s Shoes

by on Sep 25, 2008 (0) Comments

Small business owners are often curious, and sometimes desperate, to understand why their web sites are doing well — or doing poorly — when it comes to search engine visibility. Online forums and message boards are filled with questions like “Why is my competitor outranking me?”, “Why doesn’t my new product page bring me any search traffic?”, or “How come my site hasn’t been crawled in a month?”

If you live and breathe search marketing, these questions are often pretty easy to answer. But when you’re busy running a small business, these questions may as well be rocket science. One way to get answers is to analyze what the search engines think of your web site, and walk a mile in the search engines’ shoes, as the saying goes. When you learn to do that, it’s easier to solve those questions that you’ve been curious (or desperate) to answer.

Three ways to see what search engines think of your site

1. Use the search engines’ webmaster tools.

15 Features Your Site Doesn’t Need

by on Aug 28, 2008 (0) Comments

The worst mistake in internet marketing? Making things too complicated. It pumps up costs, slows site launches and keeps you offline when you could be online, selling stuff.

Who makes that mistake? You do. When you insist that that one feature is so important you can’t live without it, you’re killing yourself. If you can get 90% of the function with 10% of the effort, shouldn’t you?

So, here’s a list of features I think your site can probably do without, at least for now:

  1. Integration with your inventory management system. If you’re already selling lots online, great! Spend the fifty grand it’ll take to synchronize your store with your inventory system. Otherwise, forget it. Put it on hold.
  2. A fancy content management system (CMS). A full-featured, enterprise CMS is a great tool when you need it. But do you really need it? If you have a staff of two, you don’t. Use Wordpress or Movable Type, instead.
  3. Community content. Yah, community content is trendy as heck. But you don’t need to build your own bloody city. Before you spend the time and shell out the cash to add community content, ask yourself: Do you need to build the community yourself? Couldn’t you use Facebook? Or MySpace? Or something else? Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t need to.
  4. A talking, walking spokesperson. I’m sorry, but no one needs a little video person that walks onscreen and starts babbling about how wonderful this product is. I go online to get away from that. So save the cash. Don’t add a virtual spokesperson. Plus, they’re creepy as hell.
  5. Video. I love online video. It’s super-valuable to the right business. Is that your business? If you can’t get your message across without motion or a ‘face to face’ human element, use video. Otherwise, save the money and time.
  6. Credit card processing. If you’re selling online you’ll need to process credit cards. But setting up a merchant account with your bank will make you wonder if you’re in a Kafka novel. Instead, use a service like PayPal. Later, when you’re selling in volumes where a .5% reduction in costs is important, you can set up the merchant account. Or, even better, get a lackey to do it for you.
  7. A custom store. Yes, you want your store to look just so. If you can save thousands of dollars and weeks of work, though, why not compromise just a little and use a prebuilt store like Prostores or Volusion? Be smart. Get selling.
  8. A custom lead management system. You want a CRM system that lets you manage 3,000 leads a month. Problem is, you don’t have any leads yet. Try Salesforce or HighRise. You can hook ‘em right up to the contact form on your web site and get 90% of what you want at 5% the cost in dollars and sanity.
  9. Web 2.0 features. Whatever the hell those are. If you really need a feature, trust me, you won’t need to pigeonhole it with some trendy phrase. You’ll know you need one-page checkout, or smart form validation, or a puffy logo that looks like it’ll purr when you pet it.
  10. Multiple languages. Think about your audience first. Do you have a sizable group of folks who don’t speak English in that audience? If yes, spend the money to translate. If not, stop right there.
  11. Your own server. Yeah. No. Start off in a shared, ‘virtual’ hosting environment.
  12. A live webcam. Thank heavens, these seem to be going away. I don’t really want to see what you’re doing at your desk 24/7.
  13. A ‘wish list’. It’s nice to save your favorite products in a little folder all your own. But is that why you buy? I don’t think so. Add the wish list later.
  14. A ‘virtual office’. You don’t need to make your web site look like a real office. I’m on the internet because I don’t want to go to your office! Give me a site that loads fast and gives me the shortest possible route between my question and your answer.
  15. A ‘virtual mall’. See the previous item, and don’t make me slap you.

When you’re deciding on features for your site, analyze the costs and benefits carefully. Consider whether you want a feature because you think it’s important, or because it’ll really help your audience.