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Perhaps this story sounds familiar: Your organization began with a handful of people, and as you grew you recognized the need for a website to market your product or service. Because you didn’t have a lot of funding, you commissioned someone with a little tech know-how to create your site, using Dreamweaver. He or she did a decent job--not world-class design or anything--but decent. Great! You had a website and were getting visitors.

Fast forward two years. Your web dude left for another job, and now the person doing the web work for you seems to take days to produce any updates to the site; there’s just too much on the plate now that you’re organization is bigger and its technical needs greater. Staff turnover means that you have an old site sitting in your lap that have no idea how to update. The original site launched a couple years ago, and its design wasn't meant to do what your organization has done with it: adding content, widgets and disparate pages for different initiatives. The result? Someone on the outside asks for your web address (because...hey, your cause sounds awesome!) and you cough and mutter something about "maintenance" and "coming soon".

The nail in the coffin is that you keep going to Google and looking up some of your services using terms that you know potential customers are using, and your site is completely buried on page 9! What’s a business person to do?

Web Redesign Challenges

You face a few special challenges:

• Your budget for site redesign is fixed and you’re not sure what your money will buy
• There are innumerable companies that do web design and you’re not sure how to evaluate them.
• You know you need a solution that will distribute site updating power to non-technical staff, but realize you don't have the knowledge necessary to make the best decision.

What solution exists that recognizes these constraints and comes out on top? In my view, your decision depends on two things: A content management system and a way to get it up and running. Choosing a system is becoming more and more straightforward, as the available systems have become well-known in the past three years, and clear leaders have emerged. Finding a way to get that system up and running efficiently is the hard part. A good content management system does a few pivotal things:

• takes into account the need to distribute the power of site editing and different user types
• makes it easy to update not only content, but functionality as well--the way users interact with you from your site
• helps you migrate from where you are with open arms

The Power of a CMS

A content management system (CMS) will help distribute the power in a couple of ways. One, the great CMSs are web-based and therefore unshackle administration from a limited number of computers (no more Dreamweaver licenses!). Two, most CMSs allow you to set user roles and permissions so you don't over-distribute power and get your site into trouble.

A CMS allows you to update not only content but functionality through a modular structure to which a broad community of developers is constantly contributing. You need a form? Someone's coded it and all you need to do is click a few places. You need a way to collect donations? There's probably a module for that. Granted, your needs will, at some point, extend the capabilities that a plug-and-play module system affords, but that's where your greater strategy will come into play.

Finally, a CMS will help you migrate from where you are through ready-made tools built to help folks get from static to dynamic. This exporting and importing usually requires an expert to come in and handle the data, though many organizations choose to "start clean." Your choice will depend on how much content exists on the current site, and whether it's feasible to reproduce that content within the new site's aesthetic by human hand.

We have extensive experience with a number of content management systems including Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla; more importantly, we create and execute plans that will get organizations out of non-manageable web experiences into winning systems.

I sincerely hope you or someone you know doesn't identify with the above situation. However, if it all rings true, contact us. We'll set up a free 1-hour consultation to understand your problem and recommend the next steps toward an excellent solution. Our team has worked on a variety of large and small-scale projects, is personable, local and embraces open source technology.