A friend of mine from the investment community pinged me – why? i am a trusted peer for him when it comes to opinions on web technologies – about what were his options for setting up an easy web publishing mechanism for his corporate web site. I have summarized below what I gathered from him as his unique problem definition.
Background:
Small team of 5-7 people. No inhouse IT. Our core business is NOT any of the following: IT, website management, internet, technology developmentNeed:
An easy, inexpensive and business-user friendly web publishing mechanism for our corporate siteCriteria:
- There should not be any restrictions on applying our look-and-feel
- We should be able to “build and forget”
- A business user should be able to update the site’s content
- Do not want to be overwhelmed by technology bells and whistles
- Solution should be standard enough that we are able to find contractors easily to support us in future
- Solution should be familiar and friendly to design firms that will develop the look-and-feel for our site
Other factors:
- We do not have a lot of content
- Our site is not too deep
- Nature of dynamic content is about a maximum of 10 news updates month
- SEO Support
- Provide us an easy mechanism to add categorization and keywords at the time of making updates to pages
Price:
Up to $50 a monthTimeframe:
Consideration-to-Decision-to-Implementation within the next 2 months
Now what are his options? Based on what I know from him, about him and his company, I feel that simple stylesheets on top of a blogging platform should do the job for him. Here again, a hosted and standard platform (e.g., wordpress or blogger) would be perfect. At a high level, I have listed what I believe are options he can consider:
- http://www.squarespace.com
- http://www.homestead.com
- http://www.wordpress.com (hosted by WP and what I recommend)
- http://www.blogger.com (not sure if his team is open to hosting on Google, perhaps not yet!)
He can also try 3rd party hosting VARs for the following. These are more robust but definitely more technical too:
- http://www.wordpress.org
- http://www.joomla.org
- http://drupal.org
- I believe this is what most of salesforce.com website runs off; not their product but their website and dev community site. I could be wrong here!
- http://www.alfresco.com
I have not fully qualified the options listed above but thought that I will share this with some of my trusted connections to get their thoughts/comments
Tags: Blogging Platform, Corporate Site Maintenance, WCM, Web Hosting, Web Publishing
