The Future of Web Design - What is DotNetNuke®?

by: Lee Sykes

Have you discovered that within months your website becomes out of date and becomes a headache to maintain? DotNetNuke is the answer to your problems.

DotNetNuke® Overview

DotNetNuke® is a portal content management system (CMS) ideal for creating any type of website from commercial web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, to a personal blog.
DotNetNuke® is provided free, as open-source software. It allows individuals to do whatever they wish with the application framework, both commercially and non-commercially.

The Static Website Problem

So you’ve created your static website using Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or programmed it manually in HTML?
Your next job is to promote your website and keep it up to date with lots of fresh content that the Search Engines love.
You soon discover that keeping your website up to date with the latest news and articles is a lot of work, within a few months your website becomes out of date and the site becomes a complete headache to maintain.

CMS – The Benefits

Using the DotNetNuke® Content Management system enables you to:
Login to your website from anywhere in the world and update your content live
Quickly and easily publish articles, images, documents, news, important information and more
Save Money – Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) you no longer need to pay a webmaster to maintain your site
Support for an unlimited number of content contributors (ie. Give permission to members of staff to login and update certain sections of your website)
Easily change the look of your entire web site with just one click using skins
Extremely extensible admin interface to add and move content, panels and more.
Security - Every element of your website can have specific security settings applied to allow or deny users from seeing, editing, or administering the different parts of your site
Once you have used DotNetNuke®, you will not look back - your old web design programmes will gather dust!

What do you need for DotNetNuke®?

To run DotNetNuke® you need to use a web hosting package that provides ASP.NET and a Microsoft SQL-Server database.
The DotNetNuke® Community
An advantage with DotNetNuke® being open-source software is the vast number of users out there. There are many developers contributing in the form of improving the DotNetNuke® core code and ‘modules’ which provide extra functions to your website, such as photo galleries. There are designers creating ‘skins’ which you can use to change the graphics of your website, and there is also a central forum area where you can ask DotNetNuke® related questions.
This community is rapidly growing by the day and it demonstrates how DotNetNuke® is the web of the future.

Where do you get DotNetNuke®?

You can download the DotNetNuke® code for free from: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ simply register with the website to gain access to the downloads.
How do I learn DotNetNuke®?
There are many resources out there supplying documentation, videos and tips from installation and programming, to web design using DotNetNuke®.
You do not need to be a programmer to use DotNetNuke®; the hardest stage is installing DotNetNuke®. This is just a matter of uploading the correct files to your hosting provider and setting up your SQL database. DotNetNuke® will then automatically install when you open your website.

All you now have to do is add the content!

How Can Small Websites Shine?

by: Bob Rose

The key to a successful Website is content. Content alone will drive visitors to your site, and compel your prospects or customers to form a valuable opinion about your company. With over 7 million Websites being added every month, how will your site stand out? The way to get your Web site noticed by search engines and then to get those prospects to stay and keep coming back comes from the content on your Website alone. There are no two ways around this fact.

Enterprise Website owners have entire teams in place that can manually update and refresh content on a regular basis; small Website owners simply don't. In a world where information changes rapidly, Websites need to be constantly updated and monitored. This is extremely crucial as users - and even search engines such as Google - pass over stale Websites. Manual configuration and updating of Websites takes time and can be messy too, involving integration with multiple systems like campaign management or CRM. With a skimpy IT staff and shrinking budgets, most small Website owners find it challenging to ensure that their sites reflect their dynamic business needs.

Web Content Management Systems (CMS) – a must-have for small Websites

Content Management Systems (CMS) have emerged to address these issues. In simple words, a CMS is a tool that eases creation, maintenance and management of the content a Website. The biggest advantage is that it allows non-technical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to manage different aspects of a Website such as the general content as well as the navigation, page layout and links without any knowledge of programming tools.

Web content management is as necessary for small companies as it is for large organizations. Small Websites may not have mass popularity, but they have a simple advantage over large Websites: they are more focused and targeted. But still, that committed user community, though small in size, presents significant challenges for the small Website owner. Adding news items, making design changes or launching new products via separate Web pages is not a simple affair.

A CMS gives small Website owners the power to easily modify and change text, design and layout of their Website through well defined templates. It also becomes simple to quickly insert, delete or update anything from images galleries, forms, tables, styles or formatted lists.

Benefits

Traditionally, most small Website owners have relied on independent software consultants or vendors to keep their sites updated. However, as our experience shows us, multiple small changes conveyed for text or design is frustrating and wasteful. A CMS can ease these difficulties, providing users with a simple and non-technical way of managing the content and not the technology.

Key benefits include:

• Improved speed and ease of publishing content

Small Website owners can accelerate content publishing by giving SMEs tools that are simple to use. Content specialists can focus more on creating content and not worrying about publishing, approval processes and formatting changes--so the site still has the same look and feel.

• Maintaining consistency and link integrity

A content management system helps organizations maintain consistency across all pages of their Website (with style sheets, templates, etc.) so that branding and design are controlled to the level desired, regardless of who is responsible for the actual content. As a result, visitors have a consistent and professional experience. The CMS even helps to maintain link integrity –significantly reducing the chance of users reporting a missing link. This is critical, as a missing link in the Internet world means a missed business opportunity.

• Full control

Features like complete system auditing and reporting provide organizations the ability to manage and track history of all work, facilitating regulatory compliance. Files can be given a full document lifecycle, including check-in, check-out, versioning, rollback, approvals, and scheduling. A CMS has intelligent workflow automation, ensuring that content passes through appropriate quality gates before being published. Additionally, completely configurable workflows enable organizations to assign tasks to any person, with provisions to escalate in case defined thresholds are crossed. For example, e-mail alerts can be sent to content owners of specific sections on a Website, if these sections are not updated after a specific time period. This is difficult to do in a manual system.

In a digital world where content can creatively be used in a variety of forms such as whitepapers, podcasts or articles, effectively managing and using this content is critical for competitive advantage. A CMS can help in a huge way, by centralizing and streamlining the process of managing and publishing content. This centralized control medium also means that an organization, no matter what size, can effectively measure the success of various online marketing initiatives.

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) angle

While a CMS helps business users manage content more effectively, organizations must also understand that content management systems can be expensive to procure, complex to implement and configure, and even more difficult to maintain.

To address these issues, organizations can consider using a CMS delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). With this software model, organizations are spared the high initial cost of purchasing the license. Also since the software is hosted, so there is no hardware to buy, no software to install and no infrastructure to manage. As a customer, an organization just pays on a fixed monthly or quarterly basis and leaves the task of managing, maintaining and upgrading the software to the vendor.

Organizations also save costs, as they do not have to budget for a developer who tweaks HTML code, or a Webmaster who actually takes care of hosting. Players such as CrownPeak even provide a dedicated account manager, as part of their Lifelong Active Support. By using a SaaS model, organizations can also minimize risk and choose different functionalities as they grow. Further, as billing is on a monthly or quarterly basis, costs are spread across the lifetime of a product’s usage. This is an extremely attractive value proposition when compared to the traditional software model, where costs are paid upfront and the risk of product implementation and adoption is totally on the customer.

If you have an online presence, you need a CMS

The Internet is a great equalizer – and a user will not forgive an organization because of its size, if it has missing, incomplete or old content on its Website. In a scenario where millions of Websites jostle for attention simultaneously, a small Website owner needs the guiding hand of a CMS solution to increase its value for a niche audience. The difference between being seen as a pearl or as flotsam on the internet is too great – it is up to the small Website owner to make the right choices.