In 1997, I was Creative Director involved in the development of Microsoft’s Sidewalk project. Sidewalk was an entertainment listing, a restaurant and movie guide, a ‘what’s on’ guide which was eventually acquired by CitySearch. Our workflow required editors and reviewers to write up their articles and publish them to the site, but we needed a robust system for managing this content. A team of 2 developers were allocated to the task, along with our internal team to resolve this. The project took 6 months to complete and consisted of a Microsoft Access database and Microsoft’s FrontPage as the text editor! The project cost, just for the publishing engine was around $2million US.
This was an early example of a content management system or CMS. It was very rudimentary, but it worked. And from my understanding they are still using it!
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What is a Content Management System?
According to Wikipedia – “A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a Web site”. http://en.wikipedia.org
The world has come a long way in CMS. We can now develop CMS’s for small businesses at a very low cost. A system which is exponentially more powerful and more flexible than those early hybrid systems. There are numerous systems available. Some are flexible and powerful. Others are rudimentary and inflexible.
After developing our own system in 2000 (which received an Austrade Export development Grant) and working with clients on other proprietary systems including Microsoft’s Enterprise CMS, we decided to embrace DotNetNuke to deliver exactly the right mix of power, flexibility, scalability, ease of use and too many features to mention here.
Cracker Brandware systems are full of extras that most developers charge extra for. But we believe they should be part of a standard application. Things like Search optimisation so you rank well on Google, an effective content strategy that maps to your brand values. Email marketing. On-going training in the use of the systems and it’s many features. Google Analytics so you can track your success. Google Maps so your customers can find you. And of course, award winning interface design.
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