At WebDatamation, we made the decision several years ago to partner with the Sitecore web content management (WCM) system to provide web services. We find that Sitecore offers flexibility, power, ease of use and constant innovation that serves our clients well. In the fast-changing and evolving world of web content, it can be difficult to [...]
Tag Archive for ‘content management systems’ 
Content Management System
The current explosion in eCommerce has highlighted the advantages of and excellent Content Management System (CMS) like Sitecore.
For businesses that consider their website and their customers who contact them online to be an integral part of their business, using a content management system is only logical. It will allow those businesses to provide a seamless, high quality online experience that open source or low-end solutions simply can’t provide.
For many of our customers, their website is a strategic part of their business. The added security and performance features of a CMS allow these businesses to focus the website and the usability features that make the customer experience truly superior.
By giving developers and content providers a simple to use and intuitive system, a CMS allows the marketing department or the sales department to create website content and design elements of the site. These professionals understand the customers and their needs better than developers or IT departments. With a CMS, the control goes to the people with the ideas, not only to the people with the programming expertise
Using Blogs for SEO: RSS and Internal Links
Many businesses wonder, what is the purpose of having a blog? Depending on your stance and marketing objective, blogs (short for web logs) are great open source tools (known as content management systems) that if wielded properly can be instrumental to SEO and organic search engine positioning.
Blogs implement topical pooling of link flow through using a platform of internal linking that makes it crystal clear to search engines what each sub folder is about.
Keep in mind that most sub folders are still viewed by search engines as entirely different sites, so through strategically cross-linking pages or posts from one sub folder to another, the synergy it creates can create spikes of link flow which translate into rankings.
Another great advantage blogs offer to static or legacy (CMS) content management systems that lack SEO prowess is, the ability to ping and promote its own content through RSS feeds and send search engine spiders deeper into a site.
Another Intro to Sitecore
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
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 Sitecore
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.