The Biggest Industry Lie: Building a Website is Easy
Low-cost web-builders and template sites have seen a huge push in the last five years. With heavy advertising, big promises and low-costs, many businesses are getting a taste of what a web-platform can do for them.
The upside is that more businesses than ever before are able to get an online presence. The downside, is that the perceived value of operating a business website has dropped substantially.
The true cost of an effective business site, is drowned out by the persistent messaging the industry puts out – that operating a website is not only easy but it is practically free.
With ShoutCMS, we are targeting customers who are seeking a platform that delivers more business functionality as a standard.
An Opportunity, Not a Problem.
We can look at the current trends in CMS platforms as two primary directions. You have low-cost web-builders who serve up a slice of the latest in design and cultural trends. These platforms are great at manipulating text, images and social networking. Then you have platforms with enterprise level features, who excel at data management, inventory, transactions, and customer relationships – all for a price.
The middle ground is being served primarily by WordPress. It is by-and-far the most widely used platform, and the shear amount of plug-ins, flexibility, and familiarity will keep it this way for years to come.
For our company, we saw the opportunity to develop a platform that kept the ease-of-use, had a lower total-cost of ownership, and started businesses out of the gate with a feature set to last them the lifecycle of their website. They won’t have to worry about upgrading, about maintaining plug-ins, and they will have suite of features that were designed from the ground up to work together.
Core Business Features in a Unified UX
With ShoutCMS, we didn’t just want to build great tools, we wanted to have tools that worked great – together.
The advantages of building ShoutCMS as a software-as-a-service platform, is that not only is the level of integration between internal features higher, ongoing development of the platform is made substantially easier as all users are on a persistent architecture. Customers are kept up-to-date as patches and security issues can be addressed across the board.
The core features that we built-in to ShoutCMS:
- Invoicing
- Ecommerce
- Contact management
- Group level communication
- Group level and individual level security
- Group level and individual level content access
- Group level pricing
- Page publishing
- Mobile device compatibility
- Design customization
- Integrated email management
Aside from architectural advantages, the user gains the most in that the user-experience is similar across the platform. They gain the confidence of building a page for their website, and then find that managing products, articles, and contacts is largely the same.
Usability Impacts the Economy at Large
When customers gain the confidence in their tool, they achieve what the CMS industry set out to achieve in the first place – getting customers to maintain their own websites instead of neglecting them.
With more businesses using their websites, and having tools at hand that make their day-to-day easier, the net benefit is that they have a greater chance at success. Each of those successes add to economic growth.
This is where inspiration begins.
To find out more about ShoutCMS, check out their website.
Also, stay tuned for more featured coverage during this ShoutCMS featured week.