We’ve been using Sitecore for our own website and for client’s websites because of its incredible power and functionality. Now Sitecore has also been recognized by independent research firm Forrester Research as a top CMS.

Forrester Research points out what the experts at Webdatamation could tell you — the flexibility and power of Sitecore make it strong in areas where competitors are weak.

The system is excellent for ease in creating content and integrating the content into a site, managing the workflow, and integrating content.

Sitecore also gets high marks for its ability to effectively target sites and content, having a global approach, integrating numerous sites, and for its community controls.

Sitecore leads out in multilingual content and in providing the means for making a separation between content and the presentation. This creates a dynamic environment for delivering the message and for using graphics and text in other contexts for different purposes.

Webdatamation chose Sitecore in part because it is a powerful solution for both simple websites as well as complex, fully powered sites.

The features of Sitecore allow for a highly flexible website that can integrate all of the Web 2.0 features.  Marketing departments can add website content or sales information to a company site easily without a great deal of technical knowledge, and still maintain a professional and responsive site.

It’s simple to integrate any analytic tools  and other business software into the Sitecore system, and it’s compatible with ecommerce products so that customers and site visitors have a seamless and enjoyable experience on your site.

We also like Sitecore because of their constant updates, research and trend forecasting. We know that our customers will have all the latest tools at their fingertips as soon as they are available.

If you haven’t yet seen what Sitecore can do for you, contact us at Webdatamation and let us give you a glimpse.

Both have the advantage of being open source programs, which means they are constantly updated and improved. There are many plugins and applications created by a core of invested users, increasing functionality and removing bugs with regularity.

Still, there are plenty of differences, as anyone who has used both systems will note.

Here are some things to consider about Umbraco:

• It can be edited in Microsoft Word, making for easy editing for most users.
• There are OSS or commercial install options
• A high-quality, highly functional CMS
• Install gives you a blank page – no template, not much of anything else – This means plenty of freedom and flexibility – freedom to succeed or freedom to fail. Success of a site is entirely up to a developer, meaning you must have a highly qualified and creative developer who also knows legal compliance and standards compliance.
• Umbraco has high requirements for hosting, so it is difficult to find a “shared” hosting environment that will support it
• Still working on good ecommerce solutions
• Version 4 has better support for Safari and Firefox
• There are good plugins available, and a management system built into Umbraco

By contrast, here are some items to consider about DotNetNuke:

Has a proprietary feel, despite being open source

• Dot NET developers like it, those who are not dot NET developers have trouble with it
• Based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET, which is the most popular web technology currently
• Cheap to use and reduces total development costs – no ongoing licensing fees
• Full access to source code so it can be altered to fit individual organizations
• Can manage text, image, documents, links, events, news, banner ads and threaded info
• Supports multiple websites
• Installs easily
• Can manage site hosting, content, security, web design and membership in one program
• Multi-language ability
• Fully extensible and scalable
• User friendly interface and intuitve site wizards, help icons and interface for those familiar with Dot NET
• DNN has a large user base (125,000 registered users) and a core programming team dedicated to the system, so it is a large community. There are also an increasing number of third party developers of plug-ins, etc. for DNN

Which open-source hosting program is right for you? It depends on your abilities, wants and business model. Either way you go, using an open source CMS might be the way for you to save money and still have a strong, attractive site.

The DotNetNuke system is particularly focused on small businesses and organizations that operate on a tight budget (for example, many non-profit organizations), giving them many of the features of a large CMS on an open source platform.

DotNetNuke benefits from community sites that host developers. End users can join these communities and benefit from the combined experience of hundred or thousands of other developers who are also using DotNetNuke for the same kinds of projects daily.

Developers are able to share ideas and solutions and propose and tweak the program constantly so everyone benefits with improved projects and results.

Some advantages of DotNetNuke include:
•    Flexible and adaptable framework that can accommodate websites, extranets, and intranets
•    Intuitive and user-friendly design that allows users with little technical knowledge manage a web site
•    Site wizards, help buttons, and a user interface that is constantly updated for ease of use
•    CMS support from a dedicated core development group
•    Straightforward, simple installation for quick deployment
•    Many language options, making DotNetNuke viable for users in many different countries
•    No-cost, open source – users can do whatever they like with the program under a BSD agreement. Users can use the program for commercial or non profit purposes, with no requirements other than directing credit to the DotNetNuke community
•    Lowers the cost of managing multiple websites
•    The opportunity to create and upsell premium content for clients – site templates, content management modules and many database options, for example
•    Utilizes all the latest technologies, including modules, module packaging, ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 Express, and Visual Web Developer

There are over 150,000 registered users  of DotNetNuke, and a number of active producers of plugins, modules and templates for the program, making it a growing and dynamic content management system.

There’s some great site consistency when using DotNetNuke (DNN) and easy site navigation. The pages turnaround quickly, a number of people can work on a site at once, and there is great growth potential with DNN.

DotNetNuke is another highly versatile and functional open source solution for Content Management, particularly for small businesses and non profits.

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.

One striking feature that you would notice once you have started creating your website with Sitecore is the ability to edit content In-Line. This allows you (or your editor) to browse through the pages of your site, just as a customer or an external user would normally do, and edit content by simply clicking on desired areas. This provides you an instantaneous feedback on the overall appearance and content of the edited area and saves quite a lot of your time. Editing content on one browser window and then testing the results on another seems quite a hassle, does it not?

Sitecore has a rich set of features some of which we shall discuss here. It provides you with a role based authorization scheme for your page content editors to edit parts of the site, based on their respective needs. Design is totally segregated from content and designers get a WYSIWYG environment to effectively create designs and page layouts without having to code. Sitecore claims to increase your page rankings and goal conversions, additionally providing you exhaustive reports on website statistics.

There is also some real good news for advanced developers. Sitecore has Visual Studio integration with intellisense and this enables programmers to thoroughly explore and customize the rich Sitecore API consisting of over more than 1,300 classes and 5,000 methods. It has a pipeline based architecture based on the .NET framework that is both open and extensible. Thus, advanced developers, proficient in Visual Studio can make use of this open architecture to their advantage and customize it to fit the requirements of their organization. They may even add new custom features.

However, it is worthwhile to mention here that mere installation and getting started with any CMS that has an extensive set of features is not just enough. If your content is not professional and well managed, you may get disastrous results. It is worth paying to ensure that enough research has been put to create content that best defines your product and your customer’s requirements. All you need to do now is install your desired CMS and see your sales soar!

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.

I would like to mention here that Umbraco has particularly laid emphasis on the “ease of use” aspect. Allowing you to insert any page control from a drop down is a huge time saver. Moreover it is a completely open templating system with which designers can create accessible and valid XHTML with their markup left intact. This means that without any extensive know-how of technical parameters, designers can create professional design templates with complete freedom. This segregates the overall logic form the design within the system that is to be developed.

Integration of custom controls is as easy as it gets when it comes to Umbraco. All you would need to do is build your custom control in Visual Studio, copy the “.ascx” and “.dll” files into their appropriate folders in Umbraco and you are done.

One thing that is worthwhile to mention here is the Umbraco forum. If you are new to Umbraco, visiting the forum is the best way to get started. The forum is quite active with both experienced and novice developers sharing their problems, views and opinions. It is quite exhaustive so if you are stuck up with a problem in Umbraco, you might get your clarifications here real quick. Umbraco has recently launched umbraco.tv which is a video based tutorial website that would aid in its documentation and a better understanding of the Umbraco CMS by its users.

The official website of Umbraco claims, “You can do anything” with Umbraco. True to the fact, if you are a C# expert, then you may modify parts of the core which are basically C# (“.cs”) scripts, to suit your custom needs. However if you are a novice, just install and get started!

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”.

As a matter of fact, Joomla doubles up as a complete website application builder, allowing you to rapidly develop web applications right from scratch, with an easy to use, self explanatory and a simple to understand interface.

Joomla is free and open source, and can be used for publishing content both on the World Wide Web (the internet) or intranets. Some of its features include RSS feeds, caching features to improve performance, polls, blogs, website searches, news pages and even language internationalization. It has been licensed under the GPL. Joomla is written using PHP and uses the MySql database as its default data repository. With exhaustive online documentation and forums for your assistance and troubleshooting, extensive set of templates, extensions, plugins and free to use source code, Joomla is one of the most popular CMS  available.

Ever wondered the meaning of the word “Joomla”? It is the English spelling of the Swahili word “jumla” meaning “as a whole”. True to its name, Joomla has all the tools you would need to create, manage and maintain your website content under an authorized user level control hierarchy, under one roof.

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.

In Sitecore, Presentation is built from three things:

• layout
• sublayouts
• renderings

Content is built in Sitecore using a single layout and any number of sublayouts and renderings. A layout is an aspx page. It can contain html, code and place holders to which sublayouts and renderings can be assigned. A sublayout is an ascx user control which can contain html, code and place holders to which other sublayouts and renderings can be assigned. A rendering is an xslt stylesheet which can process the data item provided to it in xml format. Unlike layouts and sublayouts, a rendering can not contain sublayouts.

Content and Presentation are finally united in Sitecore by assigning a layout to a template or a specific Item.

When an item is requested from an http request URL which contains the path to the item in the content tree, Sitecore determines the layout to use to display the item. Multiple layouts can be specified for an item by way of devices. One device could specify for example a browser layout for the item and another could specify a print layout for the same data item.

Content and presentation can be designed in parallel. The Sitecore documentation suggests modeling the content tree based on the desired site navigation. Sitecore also supports internationalization, so that content can be generated for different languages.

It also supports workflows which determine steps that items must traverse before being published. Content will not be visible on a site until it is published.

Sitecore provides a pessimistic security model to assign permissions to users and groups. It is pessimistic in that if a user is not explicitly assigned permission, the user will not be granted the permission.

For dynamically generated content, site core has an extensive .net api that can be used in Layouts and sublayouts. It also provides xslt extensions that can facilitate building xslt renderings from sitecore xml.

A company should redesign their website for many reasons. For a company the decision to redesign a website may be more compelling than for a personal website or community website. A small company may have budgetary constraints that prevent a redesign of their website. However the increasing role played by online marketing on the success of a business will in most cases justify expenditure.

Some of the reasons a company should redesign their website are quite obvious when you visit the company’s website. Whist some of the reasons may not be as evident. A company that sells services to other businesses will have a different design and lay-out to a company that directly targets end consumers. As such different companies are guided by different factors.

Some of the reasons why a company should redesign their website are discussed below:

Outdated design

A company’s brand is affected by the design of their website. Like with any other things, a website’s design can become outdated with time. The design trends 5 years ago were different to the design trends now. A company with an outdated website will present the wrong image to its prospective e customers who visit the website. A company’s website should reflect a modern design in line with the present times in order to gain a competitive advantage.

The design does not represent your market

A company’s website plays an important role in establishing its brand. When users visit a company’s website they form an impression about the company and its values. If your company’s website does not portray the desired image for your company then it should be redesigned in a way that it does. The design of the website should be based on the expectations of its target audience. Different websites target different customers. The website of a business to business company is guided by different design objectives to a website that sells directly to customers. If your company’s website design does not reflect the needs of your specific market then it probably requires a redesign.

Updating content on the website is not easy

It is more important to update the content on your website today than it has ever been before. The market today is driven by information. It is important for a website to provide up to date information to its customers. It is a common practice today for a company to offer independent information on their website in addition to information about the company and its products. Building an online community around your customers is becoming increasingly important to the success of a website. Companies are increasingly using their website to provide additional information and services that provide added value to their customers and offer a reason to visit their website.

If your company’s website does not allow you to update content easily, then it is time to think seriously about redesigning the website in a way it can be updated with ease. Many powerful content management systems freely available today allow easy updating of websites along with many additional features that can add value to a company’s website.

Lack of interactivity and marketing opportunities

A company’s website should provide a marketing and public relation opportunity. A company’s website should allow the company to interact with existing customers as well as prospective ones. At a most basic level a company’s website should allow it to manage customer requests and also collect information on prospective customers.

Today a company has to rely increasingly on the internet in order to remain competitive. Commercially successful company websites often offer a range of features on their websites that allow them to interact with their customers in addition to information about their products. Companies have successfully used features on their website to encourage participation from customers. These include customer registration and login to access additional services; request a call back option, newsletters, email enquiry form, blog, and forum. Different businesses follow a different strategy based on the market they target.

In most cases the scope of static websites is fairly limited. In order to have a commercially successful website a company needs to adopt well thought of strategy for their website. If your company’s website lacks interactivity and does not present an effective marketing and PR opportunity for the company then it is missing out on opportunities. If the website is scalable then additional features could be integrated without a complete redesign. However if it a static website then the chances are that a complete overhaul and redesign will be required.

Now what?

Here are 10 title tag formulas that balance SEO and marketing and hopefully avoid wrestling matches in the boardroom:

1. [product name] – [company name]. If you’re selling products and you know your customers search for the product names, put the product name first, then the company name. Unless the product name is 125 characters long, in which case you have a whole other problem.
2. [article title] – [company name]. Worst case, put the article title first, then the company name.
3. [company name] – [product name / article title]. If the marketing VP just won’t back down, fine. Put the company name first, and remind them that you’re going to slam a drawer on their fingers when, 4 weeks from now, they come in to your office asking why the rankings haven’t improved.
4. [custom title] – [company name]. If you really have a nifty content management system, you can edit your title tag separate from your page or article title. Put that custom title first, then your company name.
5. [keyword] – [company name]. If you’re a one-product or one-service company, put the keyphrase that’s relevant to that page, then the company name, like this: Buggy Bumpers: Ian’s Buggy Emporium. Use a different phrase on each page! Repeating the same word again and again is a bad idea.
6. [keyword] – [product name] – [company name]. If your product name, company name and target phrase are all short, you can string them all together like this: Buggy Repair – Tune Ups – Ian’s Buggy Emporium. I try to keep my title tags under 60 characters.
7. [really cool sales phrase]. Remember, your title tag is what shows up in the search snippet. Come up with a great selling phrase like ‘Buggy repairs while you wait’. You work in the keywords and might talk the VP of marketing into leaving your title tag alone.
8. [company name]. Give them what they want, watch the rankings implode, and after you’re fired you can laugh at them from afar. I don’t recommend this.
9. [category] – [page or product name] – [company name]. This will almost certainly be too long, and get truncated in the search results. But if you have categories that are also search phrases, this is a nice, automated way to generate title tags throughout an entire store or collection of pages.
10. [ ]. You can always leave nothing in there at all. See number 8.

I used dashes to separate elements of the title tag. You can use dashes, colons or even pipe symbols (‘|’). As long as you separate the phrases, you’re fine.

And remember to keep your title tags under 60-70 characters. Less is even better if you can get away with it.

A few other posts worth checking
Search Engines are Structured Thinkers
The Easiest SEO Booster: Heading Tags
Choosing an SEO-Ready Content Management System

]]> http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/10-seo-and-marketing-friendly-title-tag-formulas/feed/ 0 http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/search-advertising-with-the-new-microsoft-adcenter/ http://www.webdatasource.com/2008/09/search-advertising-with-the-new-microsoft-adcenter/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:30:39 +0000 Akshay Sura http://www.webdatasource.com/?p=4298 With the launch of the popular web service AdWords from Google Inc, it seemed that Google had monopolized the online advertisement management scenario on the internet. However, arch rival Microsoft was not the one to be left behind. Microsoft has recently launched the adCenter service, with similar features to those of Google AdWords and have bounced right back into competition.

The Microsoft adCenter service allows business organizations to manage all their online advertisements as well as their content, form one unified environment. Users can sign up for the service for just $5 and can get started. All they need to do is specify the target audience/market and specify the budget. Microsoft prefers to call this concept, “search advertising”. You need to pay only when a user clicks on your ad while surfing and cost-per-click (CPC) bids start as low as $0.5/click. The Microsoft adCenter service determines how frequently an advertisement is shown by using two similar concepts as used in Google AdWords, pay-per-click (PPC) and click through rate (CTR). Potential advertisers are encouraged by the service to advertise only on searches and write effective advertisements. The Microsoft adCenter allows advertisers to run their ads on specific days of the week. The advertisers also have the option to specify the time of the day during which the ad should run. This intuitive feature ensures that using the Microsoft adCenter service is not only economic but also cost-effective.

The Microsoft adCenter permits the advertisers to target their ads to a given set of demographics. When a user of a certain demographic views the ad, the bid associated with that ad is increased.

The front end provided to the advertisers by Microsoft adCenter is both UI and Web service API based. With the advent of the adCenter service from Microsoft, the Google vs. Microsoft rivalry thus continues and as a matter of fact is good for the end-users.

Competition breeds better products and services.