by Marvin Kane | Jul 17, 2012 | Business, Networking, Sharing, Social Media, WordPress
When I was deciding which CMS (Content Management Platform) to adopt as my primary web building tool, I chose WordPress because of the size and enthusiasm of its community. Well, I just wrapped up WordCamp 2012 (read my take on WordCamp 2011) hosted, again, by Boston University and can tell you the community is growing in both size and enthusiasm. It’s also getting younger – or maybe it’s me just getting older. In any case, I’m encouraged by the collective intelligence, creativity and determination of our 20 and 30 somethings.
Who Are All These Smart People?
So as I did last year, I’d like to thank the following people for making me smarter:
Jesse Friedman’s book. As he says, “Buy It!”
*Jesse Friedman wrote a book. Here is how he told us about it: “Oh, by the way, I wrote a book. Buy it.” I’m certainly going to, even though, as Jesse said, “you’ll have to wait four months to get it.” Gotta love the off-handed manner in which such a bright young guy announced such an impressive achievement.
See you all next year.
by Marvin Kane | Jul 25, 2011 | Networking, Sharing, Social Media, WordPress
I just wrapped up a great weekend of WordPress related stuff at the Boston WordCamp 2011 held at Boston University’s Sherman Hall. Man there are a lot of really smart people out there and I’m grateful for their willingness to share their knowledge. For me the sense of community has always been the differentiator between WordPress and the myriad other content management systems out there. Oh I know that there are other CMS communities but I’m talking about COMMUNITY as in the willingness to share, to help, to NOT judge and to make you feel welcome. The T-shirt and the great lunch (sponsored by .tv) were certainly an added bonus.
Who Are all These Smart People?
Okay, I get that you may not care about any of this but if you’re going to hire me to build your website you should feel comforted that I care about it. So, many thanks to the following people who gave their time to make me smarter:
- Alan Bergstein – Converting an old site to a fresh WordPress Site
- Tom Catalini – Tom’s Top Ten Tips for Blogging on WordPress
- Mike Susz – WordPress Theme Construction
- Sara Cannon – Theming & Mobile: Optimizing your WordPress site for Various Devices
- Boaz Sender – Exploding Your WordPress Theme with CSS3
- Chris Penn – How to Market Your Blog
- Joselin Mane – How Blogs Are the Core to Any Social Media Strategy
- Doug Yuen – Improving Your WordPress Productivity
- Jake Goldman – Getting Started with WordPress as a CMS
And a special thanks to C. C. Chapman (who has to be the world’s friendliest human being) for not making me feel like a complete dork for asking him to sign his book, Content Rules.
By the way, Boston University deserves a thank you too for allowing the WordPress community to take over the George Sherman Union building at 775 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
City of Champions
Sidenote: On one of the breaks between sessions I stepped outside, and with the sound of delirious Red Sox fans coming from Fenway Park three blocks away, snapped this picture of a poster hanging in the window of the Sherman Union building. Pardon me for gloating.
by Marvin Kane | Jun 23, 2011 | Business, Design, WordPress
Back in the old days of the internet – I’m talking about 1995 – [because the web and the technologies associated with it change at lightening speed, I like to think of web years as dog years – one year equals seven. That means that 1995 was really 112 years ago ] building a website was a difficult process reserved for technical types who were schooled in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the programming language used to build web pages. This meant that whenever changes had to be made to a company’s website, whether the addition of images or the editing of text, the technical staff had to get involved. This was time consuming and costly. The internet became flooded with static web pages that almost never changed. Publish it and forget it was the rule.
Fast Forward
As the internet evolved and businesses began to see its enormous potential, products were developed to give non-technical people the ability to build and maintain websites without knowing HTML and without involving the technical staff. Some of the early tools, Microsofts’s Front Page1 and Macromedia’s Dreamweaver2 to name two, broke new ground but were clumsy and often plagued by bugs and inconsistent results. As the web began adopting uniform standards, web building and management tools continued to evolve. At the same time, the proliferation of websites demanded that non-technical staff be able to manage their web properties while leaving the IT staff to manage higher level priorities. The content management system was born.
So What Exactly is a Content Management System?
Contentmanager.eu.com, a European internet consulting firm specializing in helping companies choose the best content management system for their needs offers a simple, concise working definition:
Web Content Management systems were developed to resolve the issue of having highly experienced technical staff adding low level content to a website. In essence, a CMS exists to allow non technical staff to create or amend web pages without the need to involve the technical staff.
It’s worth repeating. A CMS provides the opportunity to create, edit and control content by presenting the non technical user with an interface that requires no knowledge of programming languages or markup to create and manage content.
How Many Content Management Systems Are There and How Do I Pick One
The good news is that you don’t have to pick one. Not all content management systems are the same. It’s the job of your web design company to assess your needs and choose the system that best matches those needs. Builtwith Technology, a web based provider of usage statistics offers this list of the top ten most popular content management systems:
- WordPress – with 4,064,217 websites
- Joomla – with 1,408,972 websites
- Website Tonight – with 452,259 websites
- Blogger – with 398,653 websites
- Homestead – with 305,454 websites
- Drupal – with 281,231 websites
- Microsoft Office Live Small Business – with 161,104 websites
- Google Sites – with 153,576 websites
- TYPO Open Source CMS – with 152,225 websites
- NetObjects Fusion – with 140,792 websites
In the final analysis, the only questions that really matter when choosing a content management system are:
- does it address all my business needs
- is it easy to use
I’d like to know what you think. Why not post a comment?
1. Microsoft no longer manufactures Front Page and no longer supports existing versions
2. Dreamweaver is now produced by Adobe and modern versions are dramatically improved and quite useful
