This goes out to all of the marketing people who have no control over their websites. Those who have to pick up a phone to change the wording on a page. Those who cannot add news articles without sending out emails to four or five different people. Those whose sites have sat dormant, unchanged for years, because making any changes requires triplicate forms filled out in black pen only…
Put the pen down. We can migrate that beast into a Content Management System (CMS) so you can make those content changes yourself, as often as you want.
Of course, it’s not for the faint of heart. Being in charge of your own content means you won’t have an excuse to keep stale information on your site. It means you should be staying up to date with your search engine optimization (SEO) and continuing to bring new customers to your site. No longer can you point the finger at somebody working for a different company, or for a company that went out of business. You’ll be at the helm.
A CMS can bring your site to a whole new level. The ability to change information when necessary is just the tip of the iceberg. CMS tools build for SEO. It’s much easier to build and maintain your information so that search engines find the content organized and relevant. The ability to add on new features to your site, such as ecommerce, live chat, forum discussions, news feeds, portfolio galleries, social media integration, member login options, as well as hundreds of other options, without having to completely rebuild everything from scratch, makes the initial transition time worthwhile.
Now that the benefits of making the transition from a non-CMS over to a CMS have been outlined, the questions that typically arise are “How much?”, “How long?” and “What are the requirements?” We’ll take these a piece at a time.
How much? That question is similar to, “How much does it cost to buy a car?” The answer is it depends on what you want. The good news is you’re not starting from scratch; you already have all of the content. As long as you’re looking at a straight migration, without a lot of initial changes, migrating a site is a lot cheaper than starting anew. If you use this migration as an opportunity to update your website, by changing the look and feel, the price of the migration would go up, as it becomes more of a rebuild and less of a migration. Pricing is dependent on the amount of content that’s migrating. Understandably so, a pure migration is substantially less than creating a whole new site.
How long? Not too long. The longest part of a migration is setting up the look and feel of your existing site. After completing that, porting the actual content over doesn’t take long at all. Most sites can be migrated in about 30 business days.
Requirements? There are hardware and software requirements for running your site on a CMS. Most of the time, you already have these on your hosting platform, and you simply aren’t using them, but from time to time, we run into sites whose hosting simply cannot facilitate a CMS. In those cases, marketing people must take a good hard look at the hosting plan they are currently using. Is there a benefit to remaining on a hosting platform that cannot handle the database-driven structure required by using a CMS? Or, with the relatively cheap price of hosting nowadays, does it make more sense to drop an existing hosting platform for one with a little more raw power and a little more control over the environment? Sometimes this isn’t an easy question, but most often the answer is “Yes, we can move to a new host.”
In summary, migration is a relatively easy process that provides control over your website’s content, SEO and outside sources. It’s cheaper than a completely new site, and if you want to upgrade further in the future, you’re already on your way. For help with this process, contact us today.
