Content Managed Websites

How many times have you visited a website and noticed within seconds that the content is woefully out of date? Perhaps it is promoting an "upcoming event" that came and went five years ago, or the latest news mentions "President-elect Clinton". The clues may be different but the end result is always the same - you immediately discount the usefulness of the site, and (fair or not) call into question its owner's dedication and professionalism.

Lots of times, it's not that the site owner's fault. Small businesses and non-profit organizations often can't afford to hire in-house web experts, and updating standard sites can be a bit intimidating to non-techies. That's where a content management system (or CMS) can come in handy. A good CMS allows non-technical staff to add pages and edit content without knowing any HTML, and without worrying about breaking anything. That means your CMS-enabled site belongs to you, not to your technical consultants.

There are lots of good content management systems out there. We work with a great one: Umbraco. Umbraco is an open source CMS built using Microsoft .NET technologies. It is flexible enough to allow us to build sites using our own standards based templates, powerful enough to fully support for any .NET controls we can throw at it, but transparent enough that you could look at every last line of code. In short, you get all the benefits of a CMS with none of the limitations.