Benefits of a Professionally Managed Website

Your website is an important component in the success of your business and choosing a professional website management company is equally as important to ensure your website’s income-earning success. Websites not correctly managed by an amateur company could end up causing a negative impact on your target customers, which makes your website a less effective business tool. With many do-it-yourself website development software options available these days, it may appear a simple task to run your own website. While these options are tempting, you run the risk of making your website appearance and functionality far less successful than if you employed a professional website development team.

When the Internet first emerged and business websites became popular, self-made websites generated success for most businesses. But with an increased presence of professionally designed and managed websites, the Internet has now become a competitive marketplace controlled by sophisticated search engines. Without proper direction from skilled experts, ordinary websites will not succeed at generating business.

A profitable business website requires a deeper understanding of how today’s Internet works:

• Website Design
  A website should have a fresh and updated design. This is your target audience’s first impression. Professional web designers and developers research your business subject and analyze websites of your competitors and other similar companies to determine which strategies were successful or not. Skilled designers will then improve on the studied successes when they create your new website design.
• Technical Expertise and Flexibility
  Once the website has been designed, the next step is building, or programming, your website. This is a very important step where many of the do-it-yourself websites fail. With the increased sophistication of search engine technology, having poor code or invalid code really hurts your website’s ranking. Superior websites are built with important SEO (search engine optimization) tags that stand out to the search engines. These SEO tags need to include titles, descriptions, keywords, H1, H2, H3, and P. Once a professional website is built, several tests should be run to make certain all code passes the necessary requirements to guarantee its success in the search engines.
• Integrated Marketing
  Many small businesses fall short of their larger competitors in the vicious contest for high-ranking search engine results. The biggest reason for this failure is the inexperience of the business in their Internet marketing strategies. With confusing search engine standards and fierce competition for strong keywords with high-ranking placement, it is well worth the money spent to have a professionally marketed website.  A professional website developer will successfully navigate today’s Internet by using the most current and proven techniques. This plan will provide your website with targeted traffic, quality leads, and increased profitability.
• Time Saving and Profit
  Skilled web developers, hired to build and manage your website, will save you time that could be better spent running other aspects of your business. Trying to build and manage your own website requires a regular commitment and endless dedication to your website. Let the experts do what they do best, save yourself from the headaches, and benefit from a well managed, profitable website.

In conclusion, today’s Internet has turned into a very competitive and complicated science. Websites that are not designed, developed, and managed by website professionals will not hold their own in the search engines. Your business will benefit and generate profit much more efficiently from resourcing your website design needs to a professional web developer.

All About ExpressionEngine

Rick Ellis first developed ExpressionEngine as a blogging tool under the name “pMachine” in 2001.  An early prototype of pMachine was installed on Nancy Sinatra’s (Frank’s daughter) website.  After some real world testing and success, pMachine was released to the public in 2002.

By the end of 2002, pMachine had been featured in a few books and magazines and was having some success, but at that point, the Web was young and still developing.  Ellis noticed website owners and developers wanted more control and management over their content.  That’s when Rick Ellis developed a more robust tool called ExpressionEngine and the web development community took notice.

The first version of ExpressionEngine was first released to the public in 2004 as a general-purpose content management system written in object-oriented PHP and using MySQL for storing data.

ExpressionEngine’s publishing features are robust, comprehensive, and highly flexible.  Where other content management systems may have limitations in terms of visual design elements and/or display and organization of content, ExpressionEngine fills the needs of these major voids.

Throughout the years, ExpressionEngine has increased its features, flexibility, and popularity among larger businesses in helping build their web presence.  These steps advanced ExpressionEngine to version 1.6.8.  As its usage continued to grow, more features were requested from site owners and developers.  ExpressionEngine developers were now building “application-like” sites and needed even more flexibility and features at their disposal.  Ellis Lab listened to these requests and delivered with ExpressionEngine 2.0.  This version has been completely rebuilt on Ellis Lab’s “CodeIgniter,” an application MVC framework.

New Features of ExpressionEngine 2.0

Built On CodeIgniter
Acclaimed for its speed and flexibility, CodeIgniter has become the application framework of choice for many of the premiere PHP developers in the world.

New Interface
The ExpressionEngine control panel has been redesigned to make your experience and workflow faster, more intuitive, efficient, and better organized for superior control.

File Manager with Image Editor
ExpressionEngine 2.0 features an incredibly powerful and intuitive file and asset manager that can be used from within the publishing interface or on its own.  The new file manager includes the ability to crop, resize, and rotate your images directly in the control panel.

Key Features of ExpressionEngine

Multiple Categories
Each entry can be assigned to multiple categories, and you can create as many unique category groups as you want.

Relationships
You can create relationships between entries in different sections of your site, enabling information to be shared.

Expiring Entries
You can set an expiration date on your entries so they will be automatically removed from your site on that requested date.

Multi-User System
ExpressionEngine is a true multi-user system.  Each user can be granted a wide range of privileges, which allows you to define with precise control what each user is permitted to do.

Security
ExpressionEngine has the most comprehensive suite of security features of any publishing platform on the market.

When will ExpressionEngine 2.0 be ready for prime time?

As of this article, ExpressionEngine 2.0 is in Beta form, which is available to the public; however bugs, errors, and minor fixes still need to be worked out.  In addition, there are very few add-ons, extensions, and modules that may be needed to accomplish feature requests. 

RezStream recommends waiting to upgrade your site until ExpressionEngine 2.2 is released, hopefully in spring/summer 2010.  That doesn’t mean you should wait until then if you are thinking of having a site built.  RezStream can easily accomplish this process using the current version 1.6.8, which can easily be upgraded to 2.2 when it becomes available.  If you have further questions regarding ExpressionEngine, please feel to contact RezStream at 303.872.0220.