Simply having a website is not enough in today’s competitive business world. Especially as resources become more limited, it’s important to invest in great web design to attract and keep customers.
Your online presentation is an important aspect of your business, and you want the appearance and functionality of your site to reflect your philosophy and your products in a way that is accessible and easy to use.
It’s common to feel that a website isn’t an urgent issue in a business. Sometimes the website is even an afterthought – “Oh, and we ought to have a website, too.” In today’s business world, however, a having a web presence is a primary consideration for any business of any size, and should be a top priority. Cost Effective Advertising By using good search engine optimized copy and a great graphic design, you can attract people to your site, and keep them there. If you have an informative, useful site, other sites will link to it, giving you more free advertising. You can utilize a variety of different online tools such as videos, graphics, interactive games, calculators and photo collections that will help your customers and those who happen upon your site get to know your company and your products.
So if you are going for an open source Content Management System (CMS), which should you choose: DotNetNuke (DNN) or Umbraco.
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.
DotNetNuke is an open source CMS (Content Management System) developed by a ARES and constantly modified, improved and updated by a community of interested supporters and developers.
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.
At a time when the global economy is going through a recession, using an open source program can be like a “bridge over troubled waters” over licensed software. This effectively will bring down the expenses of you or your company. I won’t say that each every software we use has an equally effective open source program but yes, it is true in case of Adobe Photoshop. The GNU Image Manipulation Program or more popularly known as the GIMP can be the open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.
One of the many reasons we choose to partner with Sitecore for our content management system is that they keep ahead of business trends, and are ready for the future.
Sitecore recently identified the three key web content management trends for 2009 – do any of these sound like goals for your company this year? If so, let us help you implement them using the seamless integration tools Sitecore provides.
The first trend is the growth of ecommerce elements. Companies want to integrate more and more ecommerce tools into their websites. One of the most popular tools for businesses to implement is InSite Commerce, a program that integrates ecommerce solutions. It allows a business to manage multiple websites and allows a great deal of flexibility for customers.
The other top ecommerce solution used by businesses is Microsoft Commerce Server, which offers intuitive tools for integrating ecommerce solutions including an out of the box shopping solution.
I know, you would probably argue with me on Google Analytics being the best of them all, but what’s the harm in knowing about this new web analytics tool on the block? Piwik, as its website claims, is an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?
Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:
No, I am definitely not going to write about the lucky number! I’ll talk about the most anticipated operating system of the year, yet to be released from the stables of Microsoft. Welcome to the new Windows 7.
I already have 7 questions on my mind. What shall be the minimum hardware requirements for this OS? Will the support for drivers be better than the previous releases of Microsoft? Will the new OS beat Vista and rival operating systems on performance issues? What about security? Phew!