If you are serious about your website, you will have a number of management applications and tools.  Listed below are some of these important tools which you may have available to you.

CMS
A CMS or Content Management System, as discussed in earlier articles provides you with the ability to maintain the content on your site without the need for any programming or design skills. Indeed your skills do not need to be beyond being able to write an email and use Microsoft Word. Effective content management systems will provide you with a simple interface which will enable you to maintain the content, structure and navigation of your pages within your site.

Management of Current Orders or Enquiries
An Order and Enquiry System will help you in tracking customer orders or enquiries by storing all the details of the order or enquiry and recording it to your database. From this data base, these details can be used for reporting purposes allowing the order or enquiry status to be tracked and relayed to the customer as their status changes.
 

User Management and Reporting
User management systems will allow for the automatic capture of all the details of users who have signed up or purchased information on your website. With the exception of private transaction details, your user management system should capture then website user’s information such as their email address and other contact details. This saves you time in not having to manually process customer details from their incoming details into your own separate spreadsheet or database every time a transaction or enquiry is made.  Furthermore, an effective Customer Management System will store all the customer’s details and track the history of their orders for you to view. This may also assist you in running any promotional campaigns making the easy of gathering contact information form all your customers and those who made enquiries easier.
Reporting is crucial in any good site. Your reporting system will provide you with information on any faults which may occur on the site as well as anything which is still working effectively. This should allow you to automatically track and record any changes in function of your sites components.
 

Promotional Management
How successful your site is will depend on your ability to promote and market your site. If you have a good marketing management system it will need to enable you to run effective campaigns and product promotions. The system should allow you to run all sorts of campaigns such as email marketing, submitting search engine and banner advertising through to affiliate and offline promotions.  In terms of product promotions the system may allow you more options when selling your product such as cross sales, up sales and bulk discounts.

Think about this: You have had a website for your business for quite a while. Over time, though it has been integral in the functioning of your business it is far from perfect. Your content, much of which may now be in accurate is far too out of date for your liking. The clutter of your website as it has grown over its life has made things hard to find, the updating process complex and difficult and even the look and feel of your site seems behind the times.

Even more of a hassle may be that in the process of the growth of your site you have lost track of all the pages on your site and having the changes made by a third party with “specialised” web design skills leaves these changes piling up on their to do list. Do you recall what it was you wanted added to the site: yesterday last week or even last year? It is difficult to say but you know that this could possibly lead you to disgruntled customers or even worse litigation due to all this out of date information.

A difficult situation indeed however you are one of many in this situation. This is a natural process which is encountered by many who engage on online business.

Luckily these problems are what a Content Management System is made to cater for.  Please read more about content management systems in our other posts.

Well this may be a bit of shameless self promotion… actually, it is.

GO txt is our free web to SMS service. To complement the website we have also launched a GO txt blog. The target demographics for this are naturally very different from GO blog, which is why we decided to keep the two distinct. That said, it’s worth mentioning because the content might also be appealing to you, dear reader.

For example, my latest post on the GO txt blog is a collection of interesting photos taken at exactly the right time (or angle).

So if you do decide to browse the posts over there (only a few so far, but more of course coming) then I hope you enjoy it.

I realise that these posts have become rather common of late, but things seem to come in groups, and blog posts seem to be no exception to that rule.

When do you think we’ll have holographic TV? Well the researchers at British Telecom think that will come in 2020s. You can have a look at all the predictions in this PDF - their 2005 technology timeline.

When stock photography is not enough, what can you do?

I find that a lot of our clients may already have a collection of photos, sketches, etc of their business for use. But when even those don’t suit, you are really left with no choice: you need to hire someone to get that perfect shot.

(just a random photo taken on a holiday to Sydney)

There are numerous benefits to be had. The first is you can deliver more to your clients this way. At the end of the job, not only will they have an attractive new website, but they’ll have those extra photos and images for future marketing and branding. On most occasions you should also be able to pass on any extra costs of hiring a photographer to the client - in which case there is almost no point not to go out and pick what shots are going to look perfect on the web.

Why the post about this? Because I wanted to point out that whilst stock photography is great, it is not an instant fix for all your graphical needs. Sometimes a little custom touch is what’s needed.

A while back I did a post on some of my favourite stock photography sites. Today I’m going to broaden out a bit to have a look at some stock video providers.

Stock video footage has only recently become viable for small to medium ventures. The costs used to be prohibitive, but now it’s starting to become more reasonable with the launch of video sections on some of the budget stock websites.

iStockphoto is probably again my favourite for this category. Their prices are not too exorbitant, and they do have some good quality video available.

Shutterstock Footage is another stock video provider. I haven’t used them myself and there range seems a bit limited but if you’re after video clips then they might be worth a look.

thoughtequity has a much more expensive range of clips to choose from, but when you need something specific it might be useful to have as a reference.

Pond5 is a more recently launched collection of stock videos uploaded by members. This seems to be the cheapest stock video site around, and there seems to be a significant amount of content, just perhaps of a lower quality to some of the more professionally captured pieces.

If you know of any others post it in the comments.