Articles - Page 143

The Top 10 AI Tools for Small Business: From Automation to a Coordinated Team of AI Agents

matt-garrepy

[note color=”#cfcfcf”]This article is an opinion piece contributed by Hemant Prasad. You can visit him on his blog, <a href="http://ecmwise.blogspot.com">http://ecmwise.blogspot.com</a>[/note]
Gartner released 2012 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM) sometime back and the next in line will be MQ for ECM. While the WCM player's positioning remains pretty much the same compare to 2011 report, it was quite surprising to see a sudden drop in the rating of Autonomy after being acquired by HP. Gartner has dropped its rating both in terms of ability to execute and in vision, primarily due to the uncertainty over HP's commitments and business plan for Autonomy.
Though there was no surprise to miss the name of one of the ECM leader, EMC from the WCM Magic Quadrant. The curiosity however grew over EMC's strategy for adding this missing piece in their ECM offerings. Now I'll be eagerly waiting to see the 2012 Magic Quadrant for ECM which is expected to be delivered by Gartner in Q4, hopefully in October itself and see how will the EMC's absence from WCM arena affect their position in ECM MQ.
A quick comparison of various players in Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM 2009, 2010 and 2011 shows the following trends:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/gartner-ecm-magic-quadrant20091011-620x231.png" />
 
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
 

</td>
<td>
<div>
Ability to execute

</div></td>
<td>
<div>
Visionaries

</div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<div>
2009

</div></td>
<td>
<div>
IBM led the race in this area, followed by Microsoft, Oracle and EMC. EMC was at No. 4 and OpenText at No. 5

<div>
 

</div></div></td>
<td>
<div>
Microsoft was the visionary leader, which reflected in its ability to execute in 2010 report.

<div>
 

<div>
Followers were Oracle, EMC IBM and OpenText.

<div>
 

</div></div></div></div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<div>
2010

</div></td>
<td>
<div>
Microsoft pushed IBM down claiming the top spot followed by Oracle.

<div>
 

<div>
EMC lost 4th spot to OpenText and got pushed to below OpenText.

</div></div></div></td>
<td>
<div>
Oracle led the race leaving behind Microsoft, IBM, OpenText and EMC.

<div>
 

<div>
EMC was not only lacking in ability to execute, but also in vision behind OpenText.

</div></div></div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<div>
2011

</div></td>
<td>
<div>
IBM gained top spot back and the positioning was similar to 2009, except that EMC was performing below OpenText now.

</div></td>
<td>
<div>
Oracle led the race leaving behind Microsoft, IBM, EMC and OpenText.

<div>
 

<div>
EMC was seen to be giving positive signals in terms of their ECM vision.

</div></div></div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<div>
2012

<div>
(My predictions)

</div></div></td>
<td>
<div>
IBM should still make it to top with its clear product strategy and overall viability. The positioning is not expected to change since 2011.

</div></td>
<td>
<div>
Microsoft should gain the top spot due to the recently announced SharePoint 2013, followed by Oracle, IBM, EMC and OpenText.
 

</div></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
So what do you think is wrong with the once market leader Documentum? Where has EMC gone wrong in its overall ECM strategy? Or is it just that the sluggish license sales is pulling them towards ‘fancy' solutions like D2? which might help them acquire more new customers with the sales pitch of ‘new user', since Webtop was perceived as a very complex user interface with the arrival of SharePoint.
In ECM MQ 2011, Gartner had highlighted the (1) Lack of synergies with its hardware and services team (2) Lack of SI and ISV ecosystem (3) Confusion over its product strategy in Social collaboration and WCM space as the key caution points for EMC.
In 2012, the challenges seems to have not gone away. EMC still doesn't have a Social Collaboration and WCM solution and future for eRoom or CenterStage remains uncertain. With the arrival of D2, it's certain that EMC will not invest into Webtop and TaskSpace anymore, which might scare the customers who have been using either of these applications since long and have built critical business applications using either WebTop or Taskspace. While EMC has been proposing D2 for content applications, xCP is being promoted for the case management/business process applications. There doesn't seem to be an automated migration path to convert Webtop/Taskspace based applications to D2/xCP 2.0 and customers might have to spend hefty sum to redevelop the same on newer platforms, which will be a painful exercise and might drive customers towards alternate solutions.
Though EMC has made lots of noise about “ECM in cloud” partly relying on their cloud storage business, but the successful roll-out of the service is yet to take shape, wherein Microsoft has already left their rival behind with the successful operation of Office365 in cloud (including SharePoint).
OpenText on the other hand seems to be enjoying relationship with SAP with few small wins in recent past primarily in the area of SAP content archival (that's the only product OpenText sales team seems to be selling), but still lacks larger customer acquisitions, which isn't a sustainable business strategy, unless they have already got into the comfort zone of eventually being acquired by SAP in due course of time. While the OpenText corporate seems to be on an acquisition spree with recent <a href="http://business.financialpost.com/2012/05/01/open-text-announces-us232m-acquisition-of-easylink-services/">acquisition of EasyLink</a>, the sales seems to be enjoying honeymoon with SAP.
Oracle made a daring announcement in Oct 2011 to <a href="https://blogs.oracle.com/webcenter/entry/stop_maintaining_documentum_and_start">swap Documentum platform licences for free</a>. It reflected Oracle's desperation to get a few customers on their side quickly and set a precedent of acquiring rival's customers. The offer was shot down by analysts soon after the announcement, who proved that the clever math of Oracle was nothing but a marketing gimmick and customer didn't really have anything in the offer to be excited about. I haven't also heard if any customer picked-up the Oracle's offer till date. The outlook for Oracle hasn't changed much since then and they still seems to be spending lots of time in just renaming the product again and again (from Stellent to UCM to Webcenter now). Though I have heard few sizeable customer acquisitions by Oracle in recent past, but they have a long way to go in positioning their solution right against the well-established players like IBM, EMC and Microsoft.
IBM has its usual problem, a behemoth which has many dishes in its kitchen and is really confusing customers with the choices it can offer on ECM. It has IBM Content Manager, the Lotus suite and the FileNet ECM, so the sales folks seems to be often giving more than the required choices to customers or competing within. While analysts have rated FileNet BPM better than the rival's case management platforms, its facing competition within, by the Lombardi or Websphere BPM sales folks. Moreover in my experience, IBM is not known for doing justice with software acquisitions and we have a disappointing history of Lotus and Rational acquisitions, which have been fast losing market attention, though being the market leaders in their segment at the time of acquisitions.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM 2012: What to expect?

mike-johnston

<img alt="zoho-crm" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zoho-crm-e1469709912237.png" />
Zoho, the company behind <a href="https://www.zoho.com/crm/?utm_source=N9518.1911883CMSCRITIC&amp;utm_medium=website-cpm&amp;utm_content=308514601&amp;utm_term=73083917&amp;utm_campaign=132038047">Zoho CRM</a>, has launched <a href="https://www.zoho.com/salesinbox/">Zoho SalesInbox</a>, the first email client designed exclusively for salespeople.
Zoho SalesInbox derives customer data from Zoho CRM or Salesforce to automatically prioritize customer conversations, ensure salespeople never miss an important email, and provide full context for every email conversation.
Zoho SalesInbox works with Gmail, Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, Zoho Mail and other standard email hosting services.
Here's a video to introduce Zoho's newest product:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0sCiZIF0MDA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<h2>“Transforming How Salespeople Interact with Email”</h2>
Zoho SalesInbox reinvents the conventional email inbox and organizes emails according to how important those emails are for a salesperson, enabling them to prioritize and focus on important customers and deals.
In addition, Zoho SalesInbox provides easy access to all customer and deal information and lets salespeople easily update their CRM data with a simple drag and drop.
Here's a summary of the key features of Zoho SalesInbox:
<h3>Hands-free Email Prioritization &amp; Organization</h3>
With an innovative multi-column inbox layout, Zoho SalesInbox automatically organizes incoming emails according to the information stored in the user's CRM account — such as the deal status, size and closing date. This way, salespeople can easily spot the emails that require immediate attention.
Zoho SalesInbox allows salespeople to view and sort emails according to a number of criteria – such as lead source or associated customer value. In addition to the two predefined folders — Customers and Deals Closing This Month– salespeople can create their own dynamic folders so they can easily find the emails they are looking for.
<h3>Context in Every Email</h3>
With Zoho SalesInbox, salespeople can view the timeline of previous conversations with a particular contact, the size of their current and past deals, overdue tasks, missed calls, support tickets raised, social media mentions and other relevant information related to the contact – all from their email client.
<h3>CRM Updates Right from the Inbox</h3>
Salespeople can now take actions that previously required logging into their CRM, right from their inbox. When an email comes in from an interested lead, the salesperson can simply drag and drop the email from one column to another. By then adding some essential information, an opportunity is created in their CRM system while keeping their inbox organized.
<h3>Reminders and Response Watch</h3>
Most email clients allow users to set-up reminders for emails they need to get to. Zoho SalesInbox is unique in that it lets salespeople set reminders for emails they need to receive.
Whenever they send an email to a customer or prospect, they can set a time limit during which they can expect to hear back. Zoho SalesInbox, through the Response Watch functionality, constantly monitors the incoming email, and if it doesn't detect a reply during the allotted time, it lets the user know so they can follow-up. This allows salespeople to keep their deals moving.
<h3>Mobile Client Integration</h3>
Zoho CRM users can configure Zoho SalesInbox on their iOS and Android devices and map it to all popular email services, including Zoho Mail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Outlook.
This enables salespeople to receive important information about the person sending the email and their accounts and associated deals, while still using the mobile email client they like. Zoho SalesInbox creates folders for “Closing This Month,” “Customers” and “Deals” to be shown along with the folders the user already has.
<h3>Helps Salespeople Send Better Emails</h3>
Thanks to its integration with Zoho CRM, Zoho SalesInbox users can receive detailed insights into how the emails they send are performing. Users can also see statistics about what email templates are performing best with customers and can receive detailed numbers on how many emails have been opened, read or clicked through.
<h2>Making Peace Between Email and CRM</h2>
Zoho's Chief Evangelist, Raju Vegesna, sees SalesInbox as the ideal solution to an old problem:
<blockquote>
“Email and CRM are the two pieces of software that are the most critical for salespeople. Yet, they usually don't work together very well.
With Zoho SalesInbox, we're solving that problem and creating a new product category that transforms how salespeople use and interact with email.”
</blockquote>
Zoho SalesInbox is currently available by request for all Enterprise customers of Zoho CRM and Salesforce users. SalesInbox is free of charge for Zoho CRM Enterprise subscribers and is $15 per user per month for Salesforce users.
To request access to Zoho SalesInbox, and find additional details, check out <a href="http://zoho.com/salesinbox">zoho.com/salesinbox</a>.

Zoho SalesInbox Launched: World's First Email Client Designed Exclusively for Salespeople

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/1200x630bf-e1469621849304.jpg" /> Viralwoot is the newly released <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1109697214" target="_blank">iOS app</a> that's helping marketers, bloggers and brands to schedule Instagram and Pinterest posts. The app also allows users to manage and promote Pinterest content, monitor Pinterest growth, increase their following and run influencer campaigns.
Originally released in 2013 as a desktop app, Viralwoot is a product of SLabs Technologies Pvt. Ltd – a globally recognized Pinterest and Instagram marketing solution helping over 70,000 brands including Buzzfeed, Alibaba, Shopify and Trivago.
Thanks to this iOS release, Viralwoot users can do the following directly from any iOS device:
<ul>
<li>Manage and monitor their account on-the-go.</li>
<li>Schedule Instagram and Pinterest posts.</li>
<li>Promote their Pinterest profile, boards, and pins to over 70,000 Pinterest users.</li>
<li>Gain marketing insight through Viralwoot’s Pinterest Analytics.</li>
<li>Create posts directly from within the app.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Catering to the Mobile Generation</h2>
The company's CEO Gaurav Sharma is hoping this move to iOS will resonate with marketers who are on the move more often than not:
<blockquote>
“With this new release we offer a comprehensive Instagram and Pinterest tool targeted towards today's mobile generation.”
</blockquote>
Instagram and Pinterest may not be of utmost importance to many brands, but for those who rely heavily upon visual content marketing, the importance of these two image sharing giants is only ever growing.
Instagram alone has <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/65939-20-instagram-stats-marketers-need-to-know/">over 300 million active monthly users</a>, and has recently rolled out a range of advertising options for brands. Pinterest on the other hand, surpassed <a href="http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/pinterest-stats/">100 million active monthly users</a> back in 2015, and has always rung true with marketers pushing things like recipes, DIY tools, antiques, decorative pieces, furniture, and so forth.
Viralwoot is currently available for free, requiring iOS 8.0 or greater. It is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
For more information visit: <a href="https://saaslabs-dot-yamm-track.appspot.com/Redirect?ukey=1QT7hlMWJUtcjx0q5X_nDOQ32K-dQT6Ek2cKE2JCiGIY-0&amp;key=YAMMID-19376642&amp;link=https%3A%2F%2Fviralwoot.com%2F" target="_blank">viralwoot.com</a>.

Viralwoot for iOS Enables Pinterest and Instagram Post Scheduling

It's been a long, hot summer. Everywhere. So it goes without saying that September is a welcome sign of cooler months ahead.
Speaking of cool, we followed some notable news throughout the month of August. We started with Storyblok's <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/storyblok-launches-new-cms-experience-to-shape-the-future-of-digital-storytelling/">launch of a new CMS experience</a> that aims to reshape the future of digital storytelling. We also dug into the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/salesforce-unveils-composable-storefront-a-digital-commerce-solution-to-help-retailers-go-headless-fast/">Salesforce Composable Storefront</a>, a new digital commerce solution designed to help retailers go headless faster than ever – and another signal that the composable movement is continuing to build steam. 
Finally, we had an <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/the-future-is-composable-a-conversation-with-new-mach-alliance-president-casper-rasmussen/">exclusive interview</a> with Casper Rasmussen, the new president of the MACH Alliance. He sat down with Matt Garrepy, one of our contributors, to chat about the future of composable, the role of headless, and what's next for the MACH Alliance and its 60+ members. 
As with all things "autumn," change is in the air. Economic forecasts remain uncertain, and many organizations are looking to 2023 with trepidation. While the M&amp;A cycle may have been a little quieter over the summer months, we're still tracking innovation and growth across the CMS and DXP market sectors – and we'll be featuring a number of exclusive interviews with industry leaders over the coming months.
Let's bid summer adieu with a few newsworthy nuggets to read with your pumpkin-spiced latte:
<h2>WordPress Homepage Gets a Fresh New Design</h2>
OK, so maybe this isn't a groundbreaking piece of news. But a redesign of a website is always an opportunity for a brand or company to "clear its throat" before it has something to say. 
That might be the case for <a href="https://wordpress.org/" target="_blank">WordPress</a>, which has certainly done its share of innovating over the past few years – especially with the introduction of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/gutenberg-2-years-later-is-wordpress-better-off/">Gutenberg</a>. Now, the open source juggernaut will be greeting us with a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/07/08/project-kickoff-wordpress-org-homepage-and-download-page-redesign/" target="_blank">fresh, new jazzy design</a> on its WordPress.org website. 
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/08/wordpress-new-design.webp" alt="WordPress new design" />
The <a href="https://wordpress.org/" target="_blank">new homepage</a> brings more attention to WordPress's benefits and experience while highlighting the community and resources to get started on the platform. Meanwhile, the <a href="https://wordpress.org/download/" target="_blank">new download page</a> greets visitors with a keen layout that simplifies the flow and presents both the download and hosting options right at the top.
Overall, a pretty sharp design solution. And no surprise: it's powered by WordPress. 
<h2>Optimizely Presents Opticon 2022: Applying the Science of Growth to Digital Experience Creation</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/08/opticon22_savethedate_ads_teaser_1200x628.png" alt="Opticon 2022 Teaser" />
Looking for the optimal conference to attend this fall?
Optimizely, a leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, announced its first in-person annual user conference, <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/opticon/" target="_blank">Opticon 2022</a>. The event will take place October 3-5 in scenic San Diego (if you're in town, make sure you hit the <a href="https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/" target="_blank">Zoo</a> - it's spectacular). Opticon will showcase how customers and partners are continuously "optimizing" their digital experiences across all channels to drive customer intimacy and business growth.
According to Optimizely, the stakes have never been higher when it comes to competing for customer attention. Businesses need sound strategies to navigate evolving market complexities, advance digital journeys, and elevate future-forward solutions to inspire teams and supercharge growth – resulting in strong, lasting customer relationships. Attendees at Opticon 2022 will hear from marketers, digital leaders, and developers who are achieving these outcomes by leaning into powerful experimentation and frictionless creativity to drive better brand experiences and accelerate revenue growth.
"To be competitive today, marketers need to do more than 'business as usual.' In a rapidly changing world, complexity is the enemy of digital marketing and great digital experiences," said Alex Atzberger, CEO at Optimizely. "To meet your customers every day and adapt, you need data and knowledge about your audience, what resonates with them, when they want to engage, and how they want to be marketed to. Great digital experiences, backed by experimentation and data-driven insights, are what enable continuous possibilities and lead to long-term growth. At Opticon 2022, we're excited to bring leading innovators, marketers, and entrepreneurs to the stage to showcase how applying a scientific method allows you to stay ahead of the curve, amidst an ever-evolving state of customer expectations."
If that content doesn't sound enticing enough, Optimizely is going for the slam-dunk with its celebrity keynote by Earvin "Magic" Johnson, who will share his experiences on what it takes to succeed in a digital-first, customer-centric business landscape. As an NBA legend and advocate for Black entrepreneurship, Johnson will explore how his lifelong commitment to dreaming big has pushed his off-court endeavors to new heights — and how leaders in digital, marketing, and growth can meet this pivotal moment with similar courage to unlock boundless innovation.
To learn more about the keynote session, or to register, visit: <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/opticon/#registration" target="_blank">Opticon 2022</a>.
<h2>Acquia Announces New Digital Asset Management (DAM) Integration with Drupal</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/11/acquia_composable.jpg" alt="Acquia logo against a composite background of Tetris-like pieces fitting together, reinforcing the concept of composable DXP" />
<a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">Acquia</a>, a leading DXP platform, has <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-announces-new-digital-asset-management-dam-integration-drupal" target="_blank">announced</a> a new Drupal integration with the company's digital asset management (DAM) solution, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/dam" target="_blank">Acquia DAM</a> (previously Widen DAM). The solution is aimed at speeding time-to-market for content. 
Using the open source integration, content authors can now leverage Acquia DAM embed codes and manage versioning through the Media Library in Drupal – which has been extended to help users easily find their digital assets via search, metadata, and categories. Acquia DAM makes it simpler to organize and control assets, as well as achieve brand consistency through a centralized, cloud-based library. 
"Content is at the heart of any standout digital experience," said Dries Buytaert, Co-Founder and CTO of Acquia. "With a variety of asset types stored across disparate systems, many content authors struggle to maintain brand consistency as they build digital properties and create campaigns. The new Acquia DAM integration with Drupal makes it easier and faster to leverage brand-approved content, so content authors can focus on launching content rather than hunting down digital assets."
<h2>DigitalOcean to Acquire Cloudways</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/08/digitalocean-cloudways-acquisition.jpg" alt="DititalOcean Cloudways logos" />
DigitalOcean is riding a wave of success, and this latest move is a testament to its growth. 
Billing itself as the cloud for developers, startups, and SMBs, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/headless-cms-strapi-now-available-on-the-digitalocean-marketplace/">DigitalOcean</a> has carved a strong and loyal niche in the market – particularly as large public cloud providers have continued to dominate the space. Now, with an agreement to acquire <a href="https://www.cloudways.com/en/" target="_blank">Cloudways</a>, a leading managed cloud hosting and software as a service (SaaS) provider for SMBs, its ocean is about to expand. 
According to the company, DigitalOcean's acquisition promises to simplify workflows for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for easier ways to create and scale their digital businesses. Cloudways will provide simple onboarding and day-to-day management that is purpose-built for certain SMBs looking to outsource their on-ramp to the internet, helping them offload the complexities of cloud infrastructure so they can spend more time running and scaling their businesses. 
The acquisition of Cloudways expands DigitalOcean’s serviceable market within global SMBs and increases options for digital agencies, eCommerce sites, bloggers, freelance developers, and builders hosting on WordPress, PHP and Magento. WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) – and according to <a href="https://twitter.com/w3techs?lang=en" target="_blank">W3Techs</a>, it powers 43% of all websites on the internet.
Entrepreneurs and SMBs already choose Cloudways to optimize the performance, value, support, reliability and flexibility of their infrastructure and application management. As a result, they can save time and money while they grow their businesses. Cloudways provides a differentiated offering with an open and flexible platform, an incredible price-to-performance ratio, and superior customer experience.
DigitalOcean and Cloudways have been close partners since 2014. Cloudways currently relies on DigitalOcean infrastructure to power approximately 50% of its customers. Cloudways serves an international and growing customer base with an industry-leading NPS score of 71. Together, DigitalOcean and Cloudways will serve over 124,000 customers paying over $50 per month, representing approximately 84% of the pro forma company’s total revenue.
“SMBs represent more than 50% of global gross domestic product (GDP) and spend $70 billion on cloud infrastructure today. With this acquisition, we are making it easier to launch, build and scale a business on DigitalOcean,” said Yancey Spruill, CEO at DigitalOcean. “Cloudways and DigitalOcean share values around simplicity, community, openness and support that are vital attributes to how we differentiate in the marketplace. Together, we will be focused on providing a simple, easy, intuitive, and trusted platform to better serve SMBs so they can build their businesses and pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship.”
In addition to expanding DigitalOcean’s technology and tooling, the acquisition of Cloudways will also increase DigitalOcean’s global employee base by 30% — adding expertise in key growth areas that will continue to drive productivity and performance across the platform.

CMS Monthly Recap: WordPress Homepage Gets a New Design, Optimizely Announces Opticon 2022, Acquia Introduces DAM Integration, and More

paris-tuzun

Above image of a car driving through an autumn forest, with foliage in a wide spectrum of colors.

<img alt="brandcast" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-9.png" />
<a href="https://brandcast.com/home">Brandcast</a>, the code-free CMS for the enterprise market, is having a good year.
The San Francisco based startup <a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160720005404/en">just got a boost in the form of $13.9M in new funding</a> to help fuel the “code-free movement” in the enterprise sector.
The need for large brands to deploy websites quickly (and without coding knowledge) is only growing, and Brandcast is one of the few platforms that is fulfilling that demand.
Here's a video on how it Brandcast can build a custom site, without code, ready for the market in ten minutes:
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/133069172"></iframe>
As news of the funding got out, I managed to grab an interview with the man at the helm of this new operation; Brandcast's CEO and Chairman, Richard Yanowitch.
<h2>Who is Richard Yanowitch?</h2>
<img alt="Brandcast" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/brandcast.jpg" />
Richard Yanowitch has an exceptional track record transforming early stage companies into category leaders, launching new technology platforms that generate tens-of-thousands of customers, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and result in the creation of multi-billion dollar enterprises.
Richard has served on numerous start-up boards and as Vice Chairman of publicly traded NDS Group (CSCO), with $635 million in sales and 3,400 employees, reporting to Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO, News Corporation.
Among Richard’s prior operating roles, he was Executive Vice President &amp; CMO of VeriSign, where he held key operational roles in scaling the company from a startup to $700 million in sales, 2,500 employees and more than 100,000 customers. Richard also served as Vice President of Marketing for Sybase (SAP), as it scaled from early product beta to $900 million in revenue, thousands of employees and enterprise customers. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.A. in the Honors Program for Classical Studies from Swarthmore College.
<h2>An Interview With Richard Yanowitch</h2>
KI: Can you tell us a little bit about how Brandcast came about?
RY: We like to say Brandcast is as much of a design company as it is a technology company. The founders’ unique blend of SaaS, design and technology backgrounds allowed them to see that nobody was really tackling websites from the marketing perspective.
In 2012 when the company was founded, all enterprise software was quickly moving to the cloud, social and mobile content consumption was exploding like never before while all of the popular website platforms were created before the days of iPhone and Twitter. So, Hayes and Dan (Metzger and Lynch — the company founders, currently Chief Strategy and Chief Technology Officers at Brandcast) got a small team to start working on Brandcast.
Their idea was to create a design-driven website platform:
<ul>
<li>For non-technical users who don’t have to know anything about coding,</li>
<li>Built on the most advanced web technologies,</li>
<li>Simple enough for anyone to use,</li>
<li>Yet powerful enough for huge companies to pull enterprise content management into the cloud.</li>
</ul>
I’ve explained it before as “Salesforce for websites,” and, by the way, the founders got Marc Benioff (the founder of Salesforce where Hayes used to work), to back their idea from the very start.
I joined Brandcast over 16 months ago and this is what got me so excited: as an ex-CMO, it’s earthshaking to introduce a design-driven content marketing platform for non-technical users — built on the most advanced web technologies on the planet. The enthusiasm of Marc Benioff was also pretty contagious — this idea of giving all of the control and ownership to marketers and designers just makes perfect sense.
KI: Are there any features of Brandcast that you feel sets it apart from competitors?
RY: Brandcast is very different in a way that it’s a design- and marketing-led and owned platform with capabilities that suit enterprise customers’ needs. All fundamental architectural decisions were made in response to the growing SaaS trend and with new web technologies in place, such as HTML5 and React. So, unlike other platforms that were built on the languages used 15 years ago (like PHP), Brandcast is a cloud-based platform with all the benefits of SaaS: automatic updates and quick security fixes, access from any computer, portability and scalability on-demand.
However, what’s truly disruptive is the workflow that allows collaboration and completely removes the need for development. We speak to designers and marketers daily, and they say their hands are tied when building websites that are dependent on developers. Yesterday’s developer-centric legacy platforms make enterprise websites tedious to design, expensive to deploy, and dependent on developers for execution, and, as we know, nothing kills a good idea faster than an overloaded IT roadmap!
The biggest enterprise platform (Adobe Experience Manager) is powerful, but outdated, expensive and requires a lot of development resources (plus, was built in the times of different demands and technical capabilities). Other aging developer platforms no longer meet the business requirements or cannot offer the needed customization and other functionality that enterprises with high-visibility websites and millions of visitors need.
Brandcast solves these problems allowing creative teams to fulfill pressing marketing commitments in record time counting only on their own resources. We regularly hear from our clients that they find the speed, scale and control they get with Brandcast, groundbreaking.
KI: Marketing automation systems are the next big thing, but Brandcast comes with its own marketing features. Can you tell us a little bit more about them?
RY: Marketing automation systems have been around for many years now, and they are instrumental in helping marketers guide their customers to purchase. However, for marketing automation systems to be successful they need a steady stream of fresh content to bring back the potential customer to learn more. We make it easier and faster for marketers and designers to launch their marketing campaigns, landing pages, microsites, and keep their content uber fresh.
Second, we are in a really unique position with Brandcast as we are architecting a next generation platform from the ground-up for today’s business demands. We offer complimentary integrations with the most popular marketing tools like Salesforce, Marketo, Google Analytics, Optimizely, top social media platforms, SEO features and other tools; and continue to expand these marketing features based on the specific needs of creative teams and the latest trends. We also make sure that marketers and designers can set everything up on their own in minutes and without code, whether linking cloud apps, using SEO tools or setting up access permissions. Together Brandcast and marketing automation systems drive engagement across the entire marketing lifecycle.
KI: Your website talks about speeding up the creation cycle by removing the development stage totally. How exactly does Brandcast do that?
RY: When working on a website, marketing and design teams collaborate live on the Brandcast platform as if, for example, they’d be working on a Google Doc together. Marketing teams get to add their content directly and keep all of the information fresh by managing websites all on their own. Designers execute on their exact vision without going to developers each time for implementation. Deploy what you design — a radical idea! Thus, the whole layer of design translation into technology gets eliminated, and a project can get done weeks faster and for thousands of dollars less (development budget often makes up to 50% of the total project cost). Everyone instantly sees all of the changes and publishing the final version is a click away.
In fact, an initial design of the actual website that will go up later can be created in a matter of minutes, and completed within hours or days rather than weeks and months. The more sites you make, the more benefits you see with the economies of scale, reusable assets, and the radically reduced time you spend on deploying a website.
KI: Why is the “code-free movement” so relevant in 2016? Isn't coding becoming a broadly held skill?
RY: The reality is — creative people like marketers and designers are a different breed. Yes, some of them are certainly curious about coding or can learn how to code (if required). However, most likely, they would much rather spend their time on visualizing ideas and telling stories they’d like to share with their customers. And it’s imperative to do it in their natural workflow which doesn’t involve coding at all. A lot of things have been consumerized in the enterprise, but this area remains one of the last very stubborn ones still driven by yesterday’s developer-centric platforms.
Dependency on developers to execute on creative projects always adds time and complexity, and customers we work with clearly see an opportunity to do something that’s never been done before when they get their hands on the Brandcast platform. We know we are on the right track when we see marketers and designers constantly inventing new use cases of their own for the platform and getting really creative with the content, which a code-free platform enables them to do.
KI: How will the recently acquired funding help Brandcast to further this movement?
RY: It’s really all about scale for us. We have already landed dozens of customers including global brands like Lowe’s, Colliers and New York Fashion Week — these customers have high-visibility websites with millions of page views, and we’ve figured out how to scale the technology to meet their requirements.
We can’t wait to share Brandcast with more customers and help them be successful throughout the whole marketing cycle, and for that we need to continue to build our world-class engineering, design, and customer-facing functions. We said in our recent funding announcement that we see code-free and cloud-based Brandcast becoming a new standard for creative teams in the enterprise.

Discussing The Code-Free Movement with Brandcast CEO Richard Yanowitch

<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/hoopla-site-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
Create your own social community at <a href="http://www.hoop.la">hoop.la</a>. Bring everything and everyone together on one site. One site with forums, blogs, photos, videos, chats, events, tweets, and more!
A hoop.la website is easy to set up and manage. It offers quick access to editing content from any page and has options and settings to easily customize your site. Building a community website has never been easier. Bring your social networks together in one place. Increase community involvement by letting members easily see conversations from Facebook, Twitter, and other social communities.
The standard community site at hoop.la has the following sections:
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Blog</li>
<li>Gallery (also known as clips)</li>
<li>Calendar</li>
<li>Forums</li>
<li>Chat Events</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>Members</li>
<li>Search</li>
<li>Activity</li>
</ul>
<h2>Setting up the Website</h2>
<img style="max-width:449px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/site-setup.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
All the settings for the website, monitoring community involvement, editing content, etc. are inside Site Setup. It's also very easy to get to these individual settings from any page of the site.
<h2>Themes</h2>
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/theme-settings-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
Not only can you select any of the available themes, but you can easily customize your theme or create your own.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/content-area-theme-settings-620x361.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
Each section can be designed to your liking. This gives you a lot of flexibility and options in customizing your website.
<h2>Modules</h2>
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/image06_ggmkjy.png" alt="hoopla review" />
Any of the standard pages for the initial website can be turned off/on inside the Modules/Configuration page. You can also rename any of the standard pages to your liking.
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/configure-menu-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
You can customize the menu under the Community Menu option. You can easily move, add or delete menu items. A nice-to-have option would be the ability to add and manage drop down menus – especially when setting up custom pages.
<h2>Custom Page</h2>
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/custom-page-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
You can easily add your own pages to your hoop.la site. This can include any html content and can inherit the same headers/footers as the rest of the site, or you can include your own. Add custom pages to the menu by updating the menu through the Community Menu.
<h2>Blog</h2>
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/blog-settings-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
You can easily set up your own blog. You can allow anyone to post or allow only certain members to post. You can also connect to a Twitter account so posts from your Twitter account also post to the blog.
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/create-blog-post-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
Adding a blog post is very straightforward. You can assign a post to a collection (similar to categories in WordPress) and can add tags. A post can also be assigned as premium content (see Premium Membership section below).
<h2>Forums</h2>
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/forum-settings-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
You can easily add forums and topics within a forum. It's easy to monitor who can view, post, and reply within a forum. Hoop.la also lets you set up a customized url for the topic (common throughout all modules) and choose specific ads to show in the right side bar for that particular topic. This is great if you have sponsors that are a good match for a particular topic.
<h2>Calendar</h2>
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/calendar-600px.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
The Calendar module includes all the common options. It's easy to add events, manage events, and track number of attendees. A nice-to-have feature would be to integrate this with registration options for events that require registration.
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/calendar-event-600ox.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
Adding an event to the Calendar is straightforward. Google maps are integrated with an event if an address is provided.
<h2>Widgets</h2>
<img style="max-width:610px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/add-widgets.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
One of the great features of hoop.la is the ease in adding widgets to sidebars – whether it's for the home page or for an ‘inside' page. You can add a standard widget that comes with hoop.la or any 3rd party widget by selecting ‘Create New Custom Widget'.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/manage-widgets.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
The option to manage widgets is readily available on each page from the sidebar area. It is also very easy to move these widgets up or down from within a sidebar or to a different location (up or down, right or left sidebar) on the home page.
<h2>Social Network Integration</h2>
Combine and view all your social network conversations in one place by integrating popular social networks into your hoop.la website. Community members can sign in using their social network account information and connect their hoop.la profile to their social networks. This expands your community exponentially. The instructions provided by hoop.la to integrate the various social networks are thorough and easy to follow.
<h2>Premium Memberships</h2>
You can easily charge members for access to premium features or content. All transaction processing is handled by hoop.la and you keep 70% of the revenue. They also automatically handle the membership list.
I think this is one of the best features of hoop.la. Where else can you so easily set up a membership site within minutes? Give the membership level a name (VIP), enter the fee and you are off and running. You can even set it up for members to sign up for a trial period. One nice feature to add would be to have multiple membership levels.
<h2>Manage Content</h2>
<img style="max-width:548px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/moderate-rules.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
Hoop.la provides a lot of flexibility in setting up your moderation rules. Do you want to moderate everything? You can do that. Do you want to moderate just Event posts? You can do that. Do you just want to moderate content with attachments, or content by a certain member, or content that contains certain words? You can set up rules to do so. The options provided within Moderation Rules covers it all, giving you as much flexibility as you want.
<h2>Permissions</h2>
<img style="max-width:484px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/permissions.jpg" alt="hoopla review" />
It is easy to add member groups and assign permissions to a group. Permissions range from type of 
events group members can view to which forums they can view.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Hoop.la has it covered when it comes to setting up a community site. The features and options are all encompassing in giving you all of the flexibility and customization choices you would expect when setting up your community site. Take hoop.la for a <a href="http://www.hoop.la">trial run</a> and try it out for yourself.
Are you a fan? Have you used it? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Build a Community at Hoop.la - Review

Ben Vallack's unique CMS, SetSeed, has just seen a major new update. SetSeed 7 beta.
The idea behind SetSeed has always been to create a central website development platform for developers to create complete websites for their clients. Developers can build websites using the powerful template system, and their clients get to edit their own content using the CMS itself. As such, the CMS application is designed to be wonderfully slick and easy to use.
It's that distinction between content and style that is the absolute backbone of SetSeed's design and user experience principles.
That's why, when editing content in the CMS, you won't see a WYSIWYG editor or, in fact, any stylistic representation of content. You simply see your content. Each paragraph and heading is it's own selectable item, making it effortlessly easy to apply formatting, reorder, delete and copy or paste. Just double click an item to edit text using a standard bullet-proof plain-text editor with short-codes for inline formatting.
Speed of development is also at the heart of SetSeed's raison d'etre. SetSeed is fully featured right out of the box – that means no plugins to faff about with. It also powers all your sites from a single installation, which means you don't need to install the same software over and over again each time you deploy a site. What's more, it means you can update your application just once to keep all your clients' sites up to date. They'll love you for that.
SetSeed 7 adds a host of exciting new tools at the developer's disposal as well as radically reinventing the CMS user experience. SetSeed 7 even works gracefully on iOS devices and desktops thanks to a completely responsive application interface.
Creating a responsive interface for a CMS is not a challenge for the feint hearted. Most CMS's try and emulate the front-end page layout within the back end, or overlay editing tools on the front-end itself. That just isn't going to happen on a 320 pixel wide device.
The solution is to make a bold decision to do away with front-end emulation completely. For example, multi-column layouts in SetSeed are represented by full width droppable content zones. No room for ambiguity and it all works just as well on a tiny screen as it does on a big one. When you use it, you'll wonder why all CMS's aren't like this.
Editing content efficiently requires a streamlined interface; not one distracted by front-end styles. WYSIWYG and front-end live editors need not apply.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/devices-620x273.jpg" />
Another significant improvement with SetSeed 7 is workflow. The all-new user interface has been built from the ground up to make working in all areas of the fully-featured CMS consistent, fast and enjoyable. Keyboard shortcuts play an important role in that for power users, and a familiar list + toolbar graphical UI makes it foolproof if your'e only using a mouse or touch.
One area that's always posed a problem for CMS's is how to handle image scaling and cropping. As a design, you'll probably have designed a beautiful page layout with a certain image size/ratio in mind. So what happens to your layout when your client uploads an image straight from their camera and in the wrong ratio?
SetSeed 7 now features an elegant and powerful way of handling images. Your clients can go ahead and upload whatever size and ratio image they like. They can then choose from a list of present crop/size profiles which you create when building the theme. You can choose to constrain or crop images and scale by one or both axis. Images can also be rotated in the CMS too. This all happens on the server-side and the images and cached once they've been modified. Your clients won't see all this happening, but they'll love how their website always looks ‘just right'.
SetSeed has always included a comprehensive set of training material to help your clients get to grips with the CMS. SetSeed 7 takes this to new levels with a fully integrated interactive step-by-step walkthrough mode. Gorgeous animated arrows guide the user through complete tasks, showing them how to work with the system as they proceed with the walkthrough. This is going to be a much loved frustration squasher.
SetSeed 7 has also seen a big update to the email newsletter system. Email newsletter templates can now feature multi-column layouts and use template Sections. This really makes SetSeed a solid contender for a business-in-a-box platform.
Other highlights in SetSeed 7 are the Embed Codes feature, theme variables, multiple gallery styles, cut/copy/paste (when working with content and pages) and loads, loads more. Check out <a href="http://beta.setseed.com">http://beta.setseed.com</a> for more information.

SetSeed CMS Gets New Update with SetSeed 7 Beta

CMS Summit 26

Find out at Open Source CMS 26, October 20-21 in Utrecht, Netherlands

What's ahead for Open Source CMS?

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“To code, or not to code, that is the question…”Indeed. And Shakespeare would have loved the drama that followed. This fiery debate around code versus no-code web design has led to some pretty heated arguments. Here’s a snarky Tweet from Jeffery Zeldman, a heavyweight design influencer, from way back in 2009:<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/jeffrey-zeldman-tweet-1024x404.png" />And another scathing transmission from Elliot Jay Stocks:<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/elliott-jay-stocks-tweet-1024x457.png" />That one poked one too many bears, spurring Stocks to pen a looong blog post explaining his opinion. If you’re curious, you can read it <a target="_blank" href="https://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/web-designers-who-cant-code/">here</a> – but the gist of it is this: to understand design, you need to understand the medium. That makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t negate the fact that many great web designers barely touch code.Even at the tail end of 2020, this philosophical disagreement continues. But as UI continues to abstract the complexities of code (think simple consoles in front of command line interfaces) the battle between coders and designers – and what constitutes a “web designer” – has grown a little less contentious. Or has it?<h3>A Brief History of Web Designers</h3>Before the dawn of the modern web, software interfaces were stark and cumbersome, lacking the visual elegance and intuitiveness that came later. Engineers ran the show, and front-end experience was often an afterthought.Print and visual designers helped mend the fence, bringing the tenants of their trade from pages to screens – evolving the medium to what might be called “high art.” Developers learned to value UI design, adapting to the principles of the process. Many designers also learned HTML to gain greater control over the experience.Coders learned design. Designers learned to code. And all was right in the universe.Well, not really…With traditional designers wanting to (you guessed it) focus on design, applications began to answer the call. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html">Dreamweaver</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage">Frontpage</a> started as clunky editors with development tools and preview capabilities, but eventually became drag-and-drop builders. And as code started disappearing, designers started relying more on pre-built templates and off-the-shelf libraries.Fast-forward to 2020, and ultra-slim SaaS platforms like <a target="_blank" href="https://www.squarespace.com/">Squarespace</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wix.com/">Wix</a> can turn almost anyone into a “web designer.” The problem: they lack the ability to truly customize with code. And the code they produce is always messy – resulting in slow, low-ranking websites that aren’t always responsive.But what if you could have the best of all worlds: a sleek, drag-and-drop website builder that’s perfect for no-code designers, but a platform that still gives developers access to code, so they can customize at will?In this review, we’ll take a look at Webflow: a platform that claims to do just that – and more.<h3>Enter Webflow</h3>Webflow has become one of the most popular website builders on the market. It provides a drag-and-drop user experience that puts out clean code, creates responsive websites that work well on every device, and doesn’t take a side in the design versus code debate. In essence, it caters to everyone that considers themselves a “web designer” and bridges the design/code chasm.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-interface.png" />What makes Webflow unique is that it’s a hybrid of a cutting-edge website builder and a sleek content management system (CMS). It brings together a complete site designer, e-Commerce solutions, and even hosting – all with the ability to choose what you need, and customize with code at almost every turn.Let’s explore some of the noteworthy features of Webflow.<h3>Webflow Designer</h3><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-designer.jpg" /><img />As Webflow’s flagship product, Designer is where you create websites and visually manipulate HTML, CSS, and other interactions. When you create any elements in Webflow, the code is automatically generated behind the UI.On the left side, there’s the Elements panel where you create elements, the pages panel where you can organize and manage page settings, the Webflow CMS for accessing your collections and dynamic content, and the asset manager where you can upload and organize your stuff. At the bottom of the toolbar, you have more granular controls for working with elements – as well as links to video lessons, help, and keyboard shortcuts.In the middle, there’s the “canvas” where you can interact with your page in real-time. You can select elements, move them at will, and edit the content right on the page.<img /><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-ui-editor.png" />Now, we’ve already mentioned Webflow’s capacity to produce clean code – and it’s true. The platform adheres to modern web conventions, using real HTML elements like divs. When you create a navigation bar, for example, you don’t draw a rectangle; you select a div element and then adjust its height, width, and other properties.Like some other web builders, Webflow uses a box model. All elements are boxes, and they naturally sit next to each other or stack on top of one other depending on their properties. Like Photoshop, Webflow allows you to position boxes anywhere on a given layout while providing responsive actions with clean, production-ready code.At any time, you can export your code or publish your changes instantly without having to worry about FTP or file versions. One immensely useful feature is the preview, which allows you to see and interact with your project as if it was already published.Finally, on the right, there’s the style panel, which is very similar to Photoshop (in fact, it looks eerily close). Here, you can access granular control over your elements. If the left panel is where you organize the structure of your pages with HTML, the right panel is where you control CSS for styling your elements.You can also create custom interactions with the Javascript control panel. Webflow's animation tools bring all the power of CSS and JavaScript into a completely visual tool, empowering designers to build complex, rich animations. You can easily create scroll-based parallax animations, progress bars, or whatever else you dream up – all without touching code.<h3>Webflow CMS</h3><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-cms.png" />Most websites rely on some kind of a CMS. Webflow takes their design capabilities a step further by integrating a rock-solid CMS into their platform. This enables web designers to build and dynamically manage their websites in one place.With Webflow CMS, you can create the content structures you need, add content (by hand, from a CSV, or via Webflow API), and then design it all visually. This makes the Webflow CMS work for editors, designers, and developers alike. In many ways, they’ve simplified the experience of other all-in-one platforms, even the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/gutenberg-2-years-later-is-wordpress-better-off/">WordPress Gutenberg</a> editor.Webflow CMS also allows you to create custom content types with their “CMS Collections.” For example, you can have a collection of blog posts, authors, clients, projects, and so on. For eCommerce projects, that can include products and categories.<h3>Webflow eCommerce</h3><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-ecommerce-scaled.jpg" />The latest addition to the Webflow’s feature set is their eCommerce suite, putting them squarely in the ring with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/shopify-review-ecommerce-only-simpler/">Shopify</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/10-reasons-why-woocommerce-is-perfect-for-ecommerce-startups/">WooCommerce</a>. The strength of Webflow’s eCommerce is that you can fully customize the online shopping experience without being constrained by built-in templates. You can customize everything from product pages to shopping carts to checkout.eCommerce also comes with its own set of pricing plans, which we’ve outlined later in this article.<h3>Webflow Hosting</h3><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-hosting.png" />We all know that hosting can be a hassle. You have to find the right platform that works with your website and CMS, then deal with endless technical considerations such as domain setup, FTP, cPanel... the list goes on.Webflow makes it easy by hosting directly through their platform. It’s all powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Fastly – a content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the performance, security, and redundancy of your website. You get fast-loading pages and you never have to pull your hair out updating PHP on your server.Webflow’s hosting also comes with these features:<ul><li>Backups and versioning: Preview and restore your site from ongoing, automatic backups, or create save points to mark progress and track changes.</li><li>Password protection: Gate individual pages or your entire website to protect in-progress work or restrict access.</li><li>Custom forms: Create unique forms to collect data from customers and connect them with marketing automation platforms as needed.</li><li>SEO management: Keep your SEO in check with 301 redirects and a customizable XML sitemap.</li><li>Integrations: Easily add Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and other marketing tools by dropping custom code snippets in your site template.</li><li>Site search: Create a custom search engine for your site with full control over the look and feel of your search results page.</li><li>Zero maintenance: No updates to run or packages to install. Just publish your site and Webflow will take care of the rest.</li></ul><h3>Pricing</h3>So far, Webflow offers a lot of value as a website builder, CMS, eCommerce, and hosting platform for almost any kind of web designer. But from a pricing perspective, things can get a little tricky.There are basically two types of plans on Webflow: Account Plans, which allow you to design and publish websites using a Webflow domain (like “yourwebsite.webflow.io “) – and Site Plans, which let you connect a custom domain.Sure, you can build a killer website with just an Account Plan. But if you want to publish a website on your own domain, you’ll need a Site plan for every website – and that requires hosting as well. Each tier places a cap on the number of pages you can build and form submissions you can receive – unless you go full enterprise, where everything’s included.Account PlansFor all intents and purposes, everyone starts out with an Account Plan. But now, there are two types of Account Plans to choose from.Individual plans are great for solo designers like freelancers and gig workers. You can start for free and upgrade for additional features.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-account-plans-individual-plans.png" />Team plans are designed for orgs that want to work collaboratively.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-account-plans-team-plans.png" />All account plans include:<ul><li>Unlimited hosted projects: With Webflow, your hosted projects don’t count against your plan limits, so you can build as many websites as you want.</li><li>Client billing: Charge your client for your bill instead of paying out of pocket – or charge any amount and make a profit.</li><li>Interactions &amp; animations: Create custom interactions and animations to make your site stand out, all without coding Javascript.</li><li>100+ responsive templates: Don’t want to start from scratch? Select from hundreds of pre-built templates.</li><li>3D transformations: Change positioning, add skews, and rotate objects in 3D space.</li><li>Global swatches: Define key colors as variables, so every instance of that color updates whenever you change it.</li><li>Custom fonts: Upload your own fonts or add free Google Fonts.</li><li>Flexbox: Build flexible, responsive layouts with the power of flexbox in a visual interface.</li><li>Reusable symbols: Turn any recurring element into a reusable symbol that you can update across your site in one edit.</li></ul><h3>Site Plans</h3>With site plans, you can choose from the standard package for personal, blog, and business websites, or the eCommerce plan that enables advanced shopping cart capabilities.Here’s a rundown of what Webflow Site Plans offer:<ul><li>Basic – At $12/month, it’s a solid solution for simple websites that don’t require a CMS. You also get CDN availability, 500 form submissions, free SSL certificate connection, domain connection, and more.</li><li>CMS – For $16/month, you can uplevel your blogs and other content-driven projects with the Webflow CMS. Includes 2000 CMS items, site search, 1000 form submissions, limited CMS API, and up to 3 content editors.</li><li>Business – Coming in at $36/month, this is a great pick for high traffic marketing projects or full-featured blogs. Includes unlimited form submissions, full CMS API, advanced global CDN, up to 10 content editors and more.</li></ul><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-site-plans.png" />All Site Plans include:<ul><li>Backups &amp; versioning: Automatically save and create restore points – so you never lose your work.</li><li>Password protection: As noted before, you can gate your whole site or individual pages.</li><li>Advanced SEO controls: Generate automatic sitemaps and customizable 301 redirects for complete SEO control.</li><li>Fast page loads: Accelerate your performance with Webflow’s Tier 1 Content Delivery Network solutions.</li><li>SSL and security: Get 24/7 hosting, monitoring, and SSL certificates to keep your site secure.</li><li>Immediate scaling: Webflow provides scaling and bursting regardless of how many concurrent users you have on your website.</li></ul>As we said earlier, Webflow’s eCommerce are add-ons to their Site Plans:<ul><li>Standard – At $29/month, this is a perfect starting place for new businesses. You get all the features of the CMS plan plus custom checkout and shopping cart, email customization, a 2% transaction fee, integrated CMS for blogs, and more.</li><li>Plus – For $74, Plus provides a solid solution for higher volume businesses that need more features and capacity. Includes everything in the Business plan plus unbranded emails, 10 staff accounts, and zero transaction fee.</li><li>Advanced – If you’re serious about eCommerce, then $212/month will get you all of the most advanced features on top of the Business plan. Also includes 15 staff accounts, unlimited yearly sales volumes, and more.</li></ul><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/webflow-ecommerce-plans.png" />Finally, if you want to go full Enterprise, Webflow has some custom options that require a phone call. That can include specialized dashboards, enterprise-grade scalability and support, and more.If you’re ready to kick the tires, you can <a target="_blank" href="https://webflow.com/dashboard/signup">sign up for a free version</a> without giving your credit card – and Webflow will let you build 2 projects (meaning 2 websites) for free. These unhosted projects will have a two-page limit, but you can purchase a site plan on a per-project basis to unlock up to 100 static pages and additional CMS pages.<h3>Conclusion</h3>Whether you prefer drag-and-drop over code or vice versa, web designers of any kind can get a lot out of Webflow. It’s a really impressive platform – and does more to unite the ideals of pure web design with coding than ever before. It also manages to bring the power of CMS, eCommerce, and hosting into a single, integrated platform. That simplifies things for a lot of users but might prove too monolithic for others who want to build a custom stack.Webflow offers almost everything you need to launch beautiful, responsive, fast, and secure websites. The only downside is its steep learning curve. In a sense, it almost has its own proprietary or tribal knowledge for cracking the usability. It’s not as simplistic as say Squarespace, and it can take a while for the unindoctrinated user to fully understand.  Thankfully, they do offer a lot of tutorials – another aspect of their product that reminded us of Adobe.If you’re a developer, some users have found Webflow to be a bit confusing – but it still manages to provide a solid platform for building custom apps. With a JSON API for the CMS, it also delivers the hub for connecting and integrating with external data sources.Maybe the loudest complaint across the feedback channels is with pricing. Many users find it too difficult to understand, and more than few suggest that it’s on the expensive side. All things being equal, Webflow provides a lot of flexibility and choice for any web designer (whatever that means) to find the right plan – and start building.<h3>About Webflow</h3><a target="_blank" href="https://webflow.com/">Webflow</a> is a web design tool, CMS, and hosting platform in one. Webflow allows users to design, build, and launch responsive websites visually, while writing clean, semantic code.

Webflow Review: Hybrid Website Builder and CMS Bridges the Design/Code Chasm

YikeSite recently hit its 5th birthday milestone and we're taking the opportunity to launch our new API with continued focus on developers.
Here is a list of new additions to our API:
JSON via REST Today we are announcing an expanded JSON/REST API that resellers can use to create websites and manage content entirely via direct calls to the YikeSite web service. This will allow app developers to create fully functioning websites in just a few lines of code. We're really excited about what developers will do with our API and we've put a few integration ideas on our new developers page: <a href="http://www.yikesite.com/developers" target="_blank">http://www.yikesite.com/developers</a> and we have updated our example app showcasing the new features at http://yikesite-api.heroku.com
MetaWeblog XML-RPC Each page in YikeSite comes with out-of-the-box XML-RPC functionality. We have configured each page in a site to behave like its own blog where sub-pages behave like blog posts. Because of the MetaWeblog API, customers can use 3rd party tools such as MarsEdit (http://api.yikesite.com/xml-rpc/3rd-party-apps/marsedit) or have content pushed to it from a content marketing tool such as Intigi (http://api.yikesite.com/xml-rpc/3rd-party-apps/intigi).
“Always On” RSS Each page in a site has an RSS feed. All you need to do is add “.rss” to any page and the RSS feed will return all visible sub-pages. Each sub-page shows up as an entry in any given page's RSS feed.
Customer Signup Notifications Each YikeSite reseller gets to have their own signup form to receive signups to their branded CMS. We notify Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor with the contact details of each signup. If you want to roll your own notifications into your own app, we also support webhooks (http://api.yikesite.com/webhooks).
More Features In addition to the above API features we are pleased to announce the following features:
1. Markdown Editor
Markdown is a markup language that is growing in popularity and allows people to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid HTML. In addition to our simple WYSIWYG editor we have just released a page setting which will allow customers to edit all or a portion of their site's pages using Markdown.
2. WYSIWYG Editor Enhancements
The new simplified WYSIWYG editor features integrated Flickr and YouTube embedding as well as advanced table formatting. And as always, this in-place editor allows the end-user to edit the content and see exactly how it will look while working.

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/api-screenshot-620x400.png" />

For more information, check out <a href="http://www.yikesite.com">YikeSite</a>

Developer Friendly CMS YikeSite Celebrates 5 Years

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ipad-820272_1280-2-e1469468616845.jpg" alt="ipad-820272_1280 (2)" />
When it comes to using technology for the purpose of organizational productivity, performing Gap Analysis is the best strategy for rectifying productivity and profits for said technology.
But what is a gap analysis, and why do organizations need to perform one for cloud technologies?
<h2>What is Gap Analysis?</h2>
A gap analysis is a step-by-step process for examining current use of technology, and researching whether the technology is being utilized to its fullest profit and productivity potential.
Organizations need to conduct gap analyses because, unfortunately, adoption of cloud-based technologies has dramatically outpaced organizations’ understanding of how they are best used to optimize profit and productivity levels. This discrepancy is especially true for organizations using enterprise content management (ECM) software, and document management software (DMS).
Although each organization will differ in its gap analysis for a number of reasons such as industry, organization size, and preexisting IT infrastructure, there are 4 core principles every organization using cloud based document management software (or any cloud-based software for that matter) should rely on when performing a gap analysis that can (and should) result in a bridging of the gap between current tech use and optimal tech use for the purpose of increasing productivity and, therefore, profits.
<h2>1. Objective Analysis of the Technology’s Current State</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/point-1.jpg" alt="point 1" />
This is the first and, non-coincidentally, the most difficult step in performing an effective gap analysis for cloud-based technologies. It can be hard to find fault in our own workings, especially if this fault has cost our organizations money. This is why the term “objective” is especially important in this step. However, the right re-correction can make up for and surpass these losses. A few important points for analysis in this step entail:
Examining most recent balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and other financial documentation, then comparing the numbers to those surmised in the months prior to cloud implementation. After accounting for any other changes that may be impacting revenue, such as onboarding or seasonal customer decline, an organization’s use of cloud technology for the purposes of productivity and profitability can be assessed.
Surveying employees to identify whether they’re incentivized to use the cloud to complete their work, or whether they rely on it to complete their projects – as well as examining whether all departments understand how to use the cloud – will also be beneficial.
<h2>2. Identify and Describe An Optimal Future State for Cloud Use</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/point-2.jpg" alt="Point 2" />
An optimal future state for cloud use (or correct state for cloud use) usually involves the following components:
<h3>The cloud is saving money on storage space</h3>
This will continue to be the case as data compression technology keeps pace with the adoption of cloud-based solutions in mass.
<h3>The cloud is saving money on electrical costs</h3>
Unlike on-premise(s) software, the cloud requires less bandwidth and energy to operate, reducing operational costs. So long as employees are buying in to the solution and using it, this step will be achieved.
And, ultimately, the most effective cloud usage requires that nearly all or all of organizations’ information is moved to the cloud: Splitting time and functions between the cloud and other methods of conducting business can prove costly to productivity, organization, collaboration, and interoperability.
<h2>3. Identify and Describe the Gap (If One Exists)</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/point-3-e1469470171158.jpg" alt="point 3" />
One of the easiest places to identify, describe, and ultimately close the performance gap with the cloud involves looking outside the walls of your own organization. You should extend your scope of interest to encompass what other companies are doing in similar industries to utilize the cloud effectively.
If they’re competitors, this information will be difficult to summon directly, but there are plenty of impartial resources to help leverage this information. What’s more, oftentimes the gap exists as a failure of interoperability between existing technologies/servers and the cloud itself.
For instance, it’s worth tracking whether all employees are buying-in to the cloud service you’ve implemented. One of the most frequent gaps is caused by many employees relying on antiquated methods of working despite their organization’s cloud adoption. Not only does this make it difficult to find and share files as a team, it adds confusion to storage methods, making duplicated information and the chaos it brings run rampant throughout all departments affected.
<h3>Do Employees “Get” the Technology You’ve Implemented?</h3>
Although the assumptive, post-implementation “go figure it out on your own” technique is IT departments’ most widely used “training” program, it often results in employees failing to understand both the significance of the technology, and the functionality it provides. Once this is identified, it’s possible to analyze deeper causes for the gap and how this gap can be analyzed and bridged through quarterly training/ensuring all new employees are trained on how to properly use the cloud service.
What’s more, a cloud “security phobia” may be preventing buy-in from the top down. Forbes recently reported that nearly 90% of the global workforce lacks understanding of how security applies to the cloud. It then follows as a sequitur that all the ethos of fear we see arising about cloud security is likely misplaced, unwarranted, and inapplicable to the contemporary business context.
Given that the security questions of the cloud have been refuted by experts in the industry, employees can be educated on this matter to feel safer using the technology as a means of not just collaborating, but entrusting their work to the cloud’s security, too.
However, it’s important to note that identifying and describing the gap in this stage of gap analysis requires the most care, as it’s the trickiest step. The difficulty arises in this stage due to the multitude of confounding variables that may arise. For instance, what may look like an operational failure may in fact be a failure to generate organizational buy in. Of all the stages, this stage requires the most effort and attention-to-detail, so tread carefully.
<h2>4. Canvass Remediation and Gap-Bridging Opportunities</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/point-4.jpg" alt="Point 4" />
Planning is the most crucial aspect of this step. It can be overwhelming trying to implement an organizational-wide plan to eliminate any productivity and profit gaps in cloud-based software.
However, the last step in this process is the easiest as it merely involves creating a plan to eliminate the gap, which involves:
<ol>
<li>Finding a solution to the gap.</li>
<li>Identifying an actionable roadmap to accomplish its closing.</li>
</ol>
Most organizations feel most comfortable visualizing the plan and incentivizing (through one means or another) employees to follow the guidelines.
The results of following this four plan can help organizations actualize the very reasons the cloud is such an effective technology: reduced operating costs, scalability across the organization, greater mobility and access to files/documentation, low cost data and information storage, and better collaboration – all of which lead to greater productivity and profits.
<hr />
This post is <a href="/advertising/">sponsored</a> by eFileCabinet. Find out more at <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/">efilecabinet.com</a>.

How to Carry Out Gap Analysis to Improve Cloud Productivity

Occasionally, a number of WordPress users may well have the urge to renew their websites and make them look different. If you are one of them, perhaps you have become bored with the way your home page looks, or you want to get rid of that annoying calendar widget.
You start by removing unnecessary layout elements, or maybe picking another color scheme or font family. But after a couple of such attempts, you realize that you need something more than just playing with your old WordPress theme. You need a new one.
Of course, you can always buy a new theme. There are <a href="http://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes.php" target="_blank"> a wide variety of premium WP themes available out there </a> , and you just have to spend some time on finding the right one. But what if you’re not sure that buying a new theme is exactly what you need right now?
What if you just want to try out a couple of different themes, perhaps on different frameworks, and dive more into WordPress itself?
In this case, there’s no real need to buy anything new. You can easily find a great selection of awesome and yet free WordPress themes and try them out. Many of them vary in style and functionality, some of them are mainly blogging themes, and some are more suited for a business website. But what’s more important is that all of them are developed by professionals and each theme may become a suitable choice for your website.
We’ve prepared this list of free WordPress themes for you and hope you’ll be able to find here some good options for your WordPress website.
<h3>Melissa</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/melissa.jpeg" />
Melissa can be a great solution for a photographer’s portfolio, or any other website that has to make a special emphasis on its imagery and visuals. Our attention is drawn by the image slider on the home page, which can be a good place to showcase your best works. Original typography combined with a dark background creates a great aesthetic appeal.
<a href="http://www.templatemonster.com/demo/52153.html" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="http://www.templatemonster.com/free-wordpress-photography-theme.html" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Mynd</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mynd.jpeg" />
Although Mynd positions itself as a theme for a creative portfolio, it is much more than that. This theme can become a wonderful solution for different kinds of portfolio and business websites. It has a lot of awesome features, such as one-click demo install, parallax scrolling effect, Font Awesome icons, a large number of blog and portfolio pages, shortcodes, different header variations and many more.
<a href="http://mynd.premiumcoding.com/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="http://premiumcoding.com/free-wordpress-theme-mynd-creative-portfolio-theme/" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Globaly</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/globaly.jpeg" />
The theme fits nicely into any business related website. It is built with Cherry Framework that considerably extends its functionality and makes it easy to customize. You can experiment with the color-scheme, change the layout of elements, choose another logo, etc. More than 80 useful shortcodes are available for you to upload the content easily.
<a href="http://www.templatemonster.com/demo/52382.html" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="//www.templatemonster.com/free-wordpress-business-theme.html" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Zerif</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zerif.jpeg" />
Zerif is a lightweight one-page WordPress theme that is nicely suited for a business website. It has a parallax scrolling effect and large hero images. Zerif has an easy-to-use contact form and is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress. The code is clean and well-written.
<a href="http://demo.themeisle.com/zerif-lite/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://themeisle.com/themes/zerif-lite/" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Lawyeria</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/lawyeria.jpeg" />
Lawyeria is a fully responsive WordPress theme, designed specifically for lawyers, but it can also be successfully applied to a business website. The distinctive contact form on the home page makes it very easy for prospective clients to get in touch with you.
<a href="http://themeisle.com/demo/?theme=Lawyeria" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://themeisle.com/themes/lawyeria-lite/" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>.Multi</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/multi.jpeg" />
Implemented with elements of flat design, Multi is a nice combination of style and aesthetics. It has a responsive design, different types of custom pages, including testimonials, archives, FAQs, contacts, etc. The theme is easy to customize and adjust to your needs.
<a href="http://demo.crocoblock.com/wp-themes/free_multi_wordpress" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="http://www.crocoblock.com/themes/free_multi_wordpress/" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Editor</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/editor.jpeg" />
Considering that the above mentioned themes were primarily for business websites, this one is made exclusively for blogging purposes. Editor has a carefully implemented design with attention to minute details. If you’re looking for a good blogging theme, you should definitely try it out.
 Demo <a href="https://array.is/themes/editor-wordpress-theme/" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Harmonic</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/harmonic.jpeg" />
Harmonic is a minimalistic theme with a big focus on quality imagery, which uses a parallax scrolling effect. The theme also has a good-looking blog, and media library, where you can showcase your images.
<a href="https://harmonicdemo.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/harmonic" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Jewelry</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/jewelry.jpeg" />
This Jewelry theme uses Jigoshop eCommerce plugin, which turns it into a perfect solution for any eCommerce business. Apart from the ordinary WordPress features, this theme has a full pack of useful additions that are important for any eCommerce website.
<a href="http://demo.crocoblock.com/wp-themes/jewelry-jigoshop" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="http://www.crocoblock.com/themes/jewelry-jigoshop/" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Convac Lite</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/convac_lite.jpeg" />
Convac is a good solution for a personal website. The theme has different variations (for photographers, fashion models, fitness trainers, etc.) and you can decide which one suits you best. The intuitive layout displays all the necessary information about you and your services.
<a href="http://sketchthemes.com/preview/convac/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/convac-lite" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Constructzine</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/constructzine.jpeg" />
Constructzine is a simple theme that can be used as a calling card for your business. It has a standard set of pages (contact us, about us, etc.) and a blog. The theme will not bore you with an excessive amount of animations, which makes it load faster.
<a href="http://demo.themeisle.com/constructzine-lite/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://themeisle.com/themes/constructzine-lite/" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Aventurine</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/aventurine.jpeg" />
Aventurine is mainly a blogging theme that has a special emphasis on a distinctive color-scheme. The turquoise background color and red fonts are definitely an eye-catcher, but you can always change them to something more neutral.
<a href="https://themes.redradar.net/aventurine/documentation/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/aventurine" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Influence</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/influence.jpeg" />
The front page of Influence has some nice-looking elements of a typography poster. The theme is mostly content oriented and is suitable for a blogging website. There are different types of posts, including posts with embedded videos and images.
<a href="http://demo.siteorigin.com/influence/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/influence" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Griffin</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/griffin.jpeg" />
Griffin provides your website with an aesthetically pleasing design. It has a set of standard features that are more than enough for a simple blogging website. The code is clean and well-written which makes it a pleasure to customize the theme.
<a href="http://demo.wpmultiverse.com/griffin/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/griffin" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Ascent</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ascent.jpeg" />
Ascent is a clean and good-looking theme that is a perfect fit for blogging. It has an image slider at the top with big hero images and ghost buttons. The layout of blog articles looks stylish and effective, the only feature that may seem a little excessive is the hover effect on images.
<a href="http://testbase.info/c/theme/wp/ascent/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/ascent" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Business</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/business.jpeg" />
The name here is self-explanatory. Being a great fit for any business website, this theme has a set of useful features such as various types of pages, shortcodes, responsive design, etc. The theme can serve as a great platform for your business.
 Demo Download 
<h3>Medics</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/medics.jpeg" />
It can be difficult to find a free WordPress theme dedicated to the medical field, but this theme could become your perfect solution. It is clean and has a well-built structure of pages, so that your clients can find all the necessary information quickly.
<a href="http://medics.fasterthemes.com/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/medics" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Flat On</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/flat_on.jpeg" />
Flat On is a multipurpose WordPress theme that can be used both for blogging and business purposes. It has two types of image sliders, different page layouts, a collection of shortcodes and other helpful features. You can choose from over 8 different color-schemes.
<a href="http://demo.webulous.in/flaton/" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/flaton" target="_blank"> Download </a>
<h3>Simplicity</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/simplicity.jpeg" />
Simplicity is a one-page theme that is built mainly for high speed and effectiveness. It uses flat design and two types of layout – default and full-width. It has a set of shortcodes and an image slider that is probably the most dominant element on the web page.
 Demo Download 
<h3>Mia Ittalonni</h3>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mia_ittalonni.jpeg" />
Mia Ittalonni is a restaurant theme that features a nice, elegant design. It has a lot of helpful features, including image galleries, sliders, custom post types, shortcodes, etc. The theme is fully responsive and all the main layout elements can be easily adjusted according to your preference. 
<a href="http://www.templatemonster.com/demo/52056.html" target="_blank"> Demo </a> <a href="http://www.templatemonster.com/free-wordpress-restaurant-theme.html" target="_blank"> Download </a>
We hope you have found this round-up of free WordPress themes useful and were able to find some great solutions for your WordPress website.
So what is your favorite free WordPress theme? Or maybe we haven't included it in our round-up? Please, share your thoughts in the comment section.

Top 20 Free WordPress Themes of 2015

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/squarespace-2.png" alt="squarespace" />
<a href="https://www.squarespace.com/">Squarespace</a> has rolled out some professionally designed page templates to speed up the time it takes to create common website pages, like the contact and about page.
Squarespace is one of the most popular website builders on the market, offering awesomely designed templates that are typically image-heavy; making it ideal for photographers, architects, food bloggers, and other professionals that rely upon visuals to convey messages.
<h2>Faster Website Building</h2>
By using a starter layout, you can build a page using a structure designed for a specific purpose, without spending too much time rearranging page elements. Starter layouts are independent of your template.
Each Starter Layout is made up of <a href="https://support.squarespace.com/hc/articles/206543757">blocks</a>. You can add your own content to the blocks, delete them, and add more blocks to align the pages with your website's look and feel.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-8.png" alt="sshot-8" />
Squarespace serves up the following range of page layouts for different purposes:
<ul>
<li>About: All-purpose, with a mix of body text, headers, and images</li>
<li>Contact: Different combinations of forms, maps, addresses, phone numbers</li>
<li>Details: All-purpose, with a mix of text and images arranged in different columns and rows</li>
<li>Features: Detailed layouts for features, services, or products</li>
<li>Photo Wall: Different layouts of Images Blocks that create varying gallery styles. These layouts are great for <a href="https://support.squarespace.com/hc/articles/220894547">creating thumbnail navigation</a>.</li>
<li>Team: Common layouts for team pages, featuring different combinations of headshots, names, and bios.</li>
<li>Misc.: Options for displaying a menu or a stocklist/multiple store locations on a page</li>
</ul>
This update plays into the hands of inexperienced website owners (otherwise known as the target market for website builder vendors). Not only does it prompt them to build pages that their visitor will expect to see, but it will give them a design that their visitors will be familiar with, too.
<h2>The Squarespace Engineering Blog</h2>
Squarespace also announced its new <a href="https://engineering.squarespace.com/">Engineering Blog</a>, which will give technical insights to those users who wish to peer behind the platform's elegant outer curtain.
Their <a href="http://blog.squarespace.com/blog/introducing-the-squarespace-engineering-blog">announcement</a> gave more insight into what the new blog will produce:
<blockquote>
“While Squarespace is widely recognized as a leader in the design space, many tend to overlook the incredibly strong engineering culture that supports our sophisticated platform. With more than one million paying customers, Squarespace sites get more than one billion page views every month. Serving such a high amount of traffic comes with unique challenges.
The Engineering Blog will cover everything from the daily life of our engineers to the technical challenges of scaling a Mongo database across multiple data centers.”</blockquote>
Considering Squarespace is a proprietary software designed mainly for newbie webmasters, I can't image too many of their users being interested in the technical goings-on over at Squarespace HQ. But hey, I'm all for transparency – in all its forms.
To find out more about Squarespace Starter Layouts, check out the <a href="https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543687">Squarespace blog</a>.

Squarespace Unveils Starter Layouts to Speed Up Website Building

It's July, and the world feels like it's melting. Literally. 
As entire continents experience <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/06/21/heat-wave-records-europe-north-america-summer" target="_blank">record-breaking summer temperatures</a> in the Northern Hemisphere, we're doing what we can to stay cool – and bring you cooler stories from across the CMS and DXP landscape.
This month was hot for a lot of reasons, including <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wix-to-host-first-ever-developers-conference-wix-devcon-2022/">Wix's DevCon 2022</a> – the company's first-ever developer's conference – and of course, the annual epic that is <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reflections-on-wordcamp-europe-2022/">WordPress WordCamp Europe</a>. Cool stuff indeed.
On the ever-present investment side of the ledger, we covered <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/kontent-ai-raises-40-million-to-bring-the-power-of-ai-to-content-management/">Kentico's spinoff of Kontent.ai</a> – and the new company's stellar raise of $40 million. Kontent plans to use the funds to further juice its platform with AI innovation, which has been a key focus area since its inception. We also covered <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/storyblok-launches-1-5m-partner-fund-to-help-agencies-shape-the-future-of-digital-storytelling/">Storyblok's launch</a> of a $1.5 million partner fund to help agencies shape the future of digital storytelling and GraphCMS' announcement that it is <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/graphcms-rebrands-to-hygraph-launches-new-federated-content-platform/">rebranding to Hygraph</a> and what this means for its future growth. 
Just under the wire for July, Magnolia sent a thunderous boom across the CMS market with news that <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/genui-acquires-majority-stake-in-magnolia-and-invests-in-future-growth/">GENUI is acquiring a majority stake</a> in its company, with plans to inject significant growth capital. While details were thin, GENUI has forged quite a reputation over the years as a growth engine for technologies, so we'll be watching as things unfold. 
There are a few other stories from July that you might have missed – so turn down the air conditioning and settle in more for more cool stuff. 
<h2>dotCMS Launches Enterprise Cloud Hosting for Single Page Applications</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/07/dotcms-interface.webp" alt="dotCMS interface" />
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/?s=dotcms" target="_blank">dotCMS</a>, an enterprise <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/blog/post/migrating-headless-cms-hybrid-headless-cms" target="_blank">hybrid-headless CMS</a>, has <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/company/news/dotcms-launches-enterprise-cloud-hosting-for-single-page-applications" target="_blank">announced</a> that <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/videos/enterprise-spa-hosting" target="_blank">the enterprise cloud SPA hosting</a> feature will be available as part of its standard <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/product/dotcms-cloud" target="_blank">dotCMS Cloud</a> offering.
For businesses running multi-channel content-driven sites, one challenge when spinning up a new single-page application (SPA) is where to host it. By leveraging dotCMS' Enterprise SPA hosting, based on AWS Amplify and backed by the global <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/company/news/dotcms-announces-dotcdn" target="_blank">dotCDN</a>, enterprises can speed up development and content delivery for global marketing campaigns without being forced to contract with a third-party vendor.
dotCMS' cloud offering includes features such as:
<ul>
<li>24/7 critical care</li>
<li>Annual core dotCMS upgrades</li>
<li>Up to 99.98% uptime</li>
<li>No API-rate limiting or throttling</li>
<li>Automated security fixes</li>
<li>Native Web Application Firewall (WAF)</li>
<li>Native dotCDN Content Delivery Network to mitigate DDoS attacks</li>
<li>Secure access with Oauth or SAML-based authentication and with IP Whitelisting</li>
</ul>
"We are providing organizations with a way to quickly deliver their content applications to customers around the world," said CTO of dotCMS, Will Ezell. "This latest offering exemplifies our commitment to security and scalability."
With enterprise SPA hosting, development teams can focus on innovation and building engaging applications to support the business outcomes instead of managing the underlying infrastructure. Enterprises can leverage the new service to save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually that they would otherwise spend on administrative and hosting costs.
<h2>Acquia Partners with Workato to Power Enterprise Connectivity to Acquia CDP, Adds Data Subject Deletion Request Features</h2>
<a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">Acquia</a>, a leading digital experience company, has made several important updates to its CDP this month. 
First, they <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-partners-workato-power-enterprise-connectivity-acquia-cdp" target="_blank">announced</a> a partnership with the integration and workflow automation platform <a href="https://www.workato.com/" target="_blank">Workato</a> to power enterprise connectivity to Acquia Customer Data Platform (CDP). They also added new data subject deletion request features that will help their customers comply with the GDPR regulations and privacy laws. Using a new self-service interface, organizations can rapidly process "Right to Erasure" (otherwise known as "Right to be Forgotten") requests associated with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and more from their customers. 
Partnership with Workato 
Acquia's partnership with Workato will allow organizations to integrate Acquia CDP with hundreds of external cloud services via secure, enterprise-grade APIs through out-of-box connectors. As the company noted: "The connectivity powered by Workato will help customers achieve even faster time-to-value by reducing the time it takes to get their data from their preferred cloud services into and out of Acquia CDP."
Workato is a leading enterprise automation platform that enables businesses, and IT teams to integrate their apps and automate their business workflows. It has been <a href="https://discover.workato.com/gartner-ipaas-mq/p/1" target="_blank">selected as a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service</a> for 4th year in a row.
"We're pleased to partner with Workato to add hundreds of integrations between Acquia CDP and marketing, analytics, and commerce applications," said Mark Picone, SVP and General Manager, Marketing Cloud, at Acquia. "The connectivity powered by Workato will help customers achieve even faster time-to-value by reducing the time it takes to get their data from their preferred cloud services into and out of Acquia CDP."
As a part of the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-launches-new-open-digital-experience-platform/" target="_blank">Acquia Marketing Cloud platform</a>, Acquia CDP enables marketers to aggregate and activate data from technologies of their choice into a unified, 360-degree customer profile. From there, marketers can use Acquia CDP to orchestrate personalized, AI-powered campaigns across the entire omnichannel customer journey.
"We're seeing a continued trend around the growing needs for SaaS connectivity, and our partnership with Acquia will allow their communities of partners and customers to keep up with the accelerated demand," said Bhaskar Roy, CMO at Workato. "Not only will they be able to build and leverage robust connectors to their preferred applications, but they will also be able to connect to these applications and automate workflows across them. We're excited to be partnering with Acquia, who has become a leading force in the future of digital experiences by embracing the power of automation."
David Wallace, Research Director, Customer Intelligence and Analytics at IDC, commented: "Digital-first brands must focus on quality, speed-to-value, and agility to deliver the personalized experiences expected by their customers. Customer data platforms help brands achieve their goals not only with productized integrations and APIs but also enterprise-grade, pre-built connectors across an array of digital channels for the flexibility for multiple use cases. Acquia, through its partnership with Workato and inherent low-code tooling enables this increased flexibility."
New Regulatory Compliance Features
Soon after the partnership with Workato, Acquia also <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-adds-data-subject-deletion-request-features-acquia-cdp" target="_blank">announced</a> they added new regulatory compliance features that help organizations using <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/customer-data-platform" target="_blank">Acquia Customer Data Platform (CDP)</a> to comply with data subject requests and privacy laws in general. 
"This feature for legal and compliance workflows is the latest in a series of self-service updates we're making to Acquia CDP," said Janessa Worrell, Director of Product Management at Acquia. "Our goal is to make it simple for organizations using Acquia CDP to process deletion requests from their own customers, ensuring that these requests are handled quickly. Customers can expect more self-service features in the coming months, removing friction and making common Acquia CDP workflows simpler to execute."
Other recent self-service updates include secure credentials management for Acquia CDP out-of-the-box connectors. Organizations can now generate and manage their own credentials for pre-built connectors to external services such as Facebook or Google.
<h2>WordCamp US 2022 Tickets Sold Out, All Sessions to be Livestreamed</h2>
Two months after the most popular WordPress event, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reflections-on-wordcamp-europe-2022/" target="_blank">WordCamp Europe</a>, has ended, WordCamp US will be hosting its two-day event in San Diego, California, from September 9 through September 11. Like WordCamp Europe, this will be the first in-person event since 2019. 
With the COVID-19 still looming and to allow for adequate social distancing, this year's WordCamp US event is designed as a smaller event - limited to 650 attendees - compared to the previous years. Since it is the first in-person event in two years, the demand was extremely high, and the <a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/tickets/" target="_blank">tickets</a> are already sold out but don't worry. You can watch all the WCUS 2022 sessions <a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/livestream/" target="_blank">online </a>without having to purchase any tickets.
WCUS has also begun<a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/speakers/" target="_blank"> announcing its speakers</a>. This year they are making an increased effort to give more opportunities to underrepresented speakers. 
The opening remarks will begin at 9:00 am on Friday and Saturday, and the sessions will run from 9:15 am to 5:30 pm. The last day of the event will be the "Contributor Day" on Sunday.
You can follow the updates via the <a href="https://paper.dropbox.com/?q=%23WCUS" target="_blank">#WCUS</a> hashtag on Twitter.
<h2>Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud (XM Cloud) Now Available</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/07/xmcloud-ui.jpg" alt="SiteCore XM Cloud user interface " />
<a href="https://www.sitecore.com/" target="_blank">Sitecore</a>, a global leader in end-to-end digital experience software, <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2022/07/sitecore-experience-manager-cloud-now-available" target="_blank">announced</a> that it has released its <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud</a>. This latest product release will provide brands with unrivaled speed to market in implementing customer experiences, simplifying design and deployment, eliminating upgrades, and dramatically decreasing ownership costs. With XM Cloud, marketers can instantly create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel experiences with an industry-leading enterprise-ready CMS.
According to a <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2022/05/us-brand-authenticity-report" target="_blank">recent survey by Sitecore</a>, online interactions play an outsized role in driving engagement between brands and customers. The digital experience, while valued by consumers, creates a scalability issue for marketers to meet demand. <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">Sitecore XM Cloud</a> provides a comprehensive SaaS CMS for the Enterprise solution for brands by overcoming global scaling problems, including variable traffic, supporting multi-brand architectures, and site security.
For business users, <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">XM Cloud</a> offers the ability to build pixel-perfect digital experiences via a WYSIWYG authoring experience that can access content anywhere, with embedded testing, personalization, and integrated visitor analytics. For developers, <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">XM Cloud</a> can be used with headless development techniques, working with modern frontend frameworks and supporting all deployment scenarios.
"Consumer behavior has changed rapidly over the past two years. Audiences have become very digitally savvy and have an expectation from brands to deliver highly personalized customer experiences," said Dave O'Flanagan, chief product officer, Sitecore. "This puts marketers in the unenviable position of trying to meet this expectation, but with tools and solutions that don't deliver, and in some cases hamstring, the needed agility to meet demand. Sitecore XM Cloud provides marketers with a truly end-to-end, SaaS-based solution that not only helps brands meet consumer expectations but also delivers a best-of-class omnichannel customer experience."
Through <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">Sitecore XM Cloud</a>, the company's entire <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-experience-platform" target="_blank">Digital Experience Platform</a> can now be delivered through a modern cloud architecture, providing brands and marketers with:
<ul>
<li>Continued innovation – new features and capabilities will be automatically delivered and integrated</li>
<li>Elastic scaling – "set-and-forget" traffic volume demands</li>
<li>Composability – all of Sitecore's platform solutions can now be purchased independently and will fit in a best-of-breed marketing technology stack</li>
<li>On-the-Fly Engagement – rapidly create experiences to meet constantly evolving market needs</li>
<li>Multi-channel content management - create content once and reuse across any channel and experience</li>
<li>Simplicity for marketers – business-focused tools and intuitive content authoring workflows</li>
<li>Agility for developers – customized builds with modern frameworks</li>
</ul>

CMS Monthly Recap: dotCMS Launches Enterprise Cloud Hosting, Acquia Partners with Workato, Sitecore Releases Experience Manager Cloud, and More

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