How to keep your Website Designing

Your IT systems do a lot more than you realise - and your money can go a lot further than you think. This week IT consultant Richard Bartlett shows you how you can keep your web site up to date without depending on a web design agency.

The most common reason for websites failing is that they stop getting updated, so people stop visiting them (which is a downward spiral). The problem is particularly acute for smaller businesses who cannot afford to have even part of one person dedicated to updating the website. The solution which technology has presented in recent years is 'Web Content Management Systems' (Web CMS for short). In a nutshell these applications allow people without any HTML or web designing companies to update the content on a website, using simple formatting options which everyone is familiar with (bold, italic, bullets, numbering etc.) The CMS enforces the 'house style' so whatever you type in appears in the look and feel of the site, including pictures and text.

The upside of these systems is that the web design company you employ only needs to set up the site once, and provide you with a CMS to continue updating it from that point on. Because it's so simple to use, your marketing department can add company news or an event, and your administration staff can add a new job advert. The downside of these systems is that while they're often free, they're not simple to install, and installation costs money. If you already have a new site and don't want to spend a lot of money on a web design agency fees then you're stuck with putting all your updates through your agency (with the resulting fees).

There is (as always!) another way though. With some simple changes to the site you can use RSS and Feed Burner to 'push' your business blog entries to your website. All you need is
1. A blog (I use Type pad, where a Pro Account costs around £100 per year), and
2. A FeedBurner account (free).
You categorise your blog entries according to their type (e.g. news, events, jobs), and set up an RSS feed for each category. Then you use FeedBurner 'BuzzBoost' to republish your blog article anywhere on your site with just a simple snippet of HTML. This way, you can have portions of your site updated as often as you update your blog, making it much easier to keep it alive and keep visitors coming to your site.

Source:cambridgenetwork.co.uk