Infrequently Asked Website Questions

1. How does Newfangled's radical approach of giving away the NewfangledCMS multiply benefits to our clients?

2. What are the long-term benefits of utilizing a content management system?

3. What are the overlooked advantages of database driven sites?

4. What website capabilities are most underutilized by businesses?

Newfangled made a radical business decision after it invested thousands of hours in research and development building it's the NewfangledCMS. Unlike other developers or software designers who sell their content management systems for tens of thousands of dollars, Newfangled gives every one of its clients free user licenses to the NewfangledCMS. The obvious benefit of this decision is that our clients do not have to pay for the software. However, there are other benefits as well.


As a result of our decision, virtually every project we do is a NewfangledCMS project. If we had decided to charge for the NewfangledCMS only a percentage of our clients would choose to use it. Instead, because we give it away, everything we do is NewfangledCMS based. This means that our clients now benefit from each other. Often, when we build a new site, we improve the NewfangledCMS and add new capabilities. These improvements and capabilities benefit all new clients, and existing clients when they choose to upgrade to the latest version of the NewfangledCMS or implement NewfangledCMS applications.


If we charged license fees for the NewfangledCMS, so that only a percentage of our clients chose to use it, we would only be working in it some of the time. Our efficiency and proficiency with the NewfangledCMS would be limited. Instead, we are constantly working with it and our developers have become extremely adept. This means that our clients benefit from working with developers that can get their sites built with amazing speed and efficiency. Because Newfangled bases pricing on actual development time, our clients benefit by our efficiencies through highly competitive budgets and maximized use of our developer's time.

The obvious benefit of a content management system is that you can add, edit, and update your content as much as you want. However the long-term advantages of a database driven, content management approach can be even more valuable. There are at least three other long-term benefits associated with using a content management system that are commonly overlooked, but can radically reduce the long-term cost of ownership of a web site.


The typical shelf life of a website is somewhere between two to three years. Most sites get built, and remain pretty much the same over the few years of their use. At some point the site becomes embarrassingly old and desperately needs to be redone. At this point the old site is thrown away, and a new site is built. Such rebuilds are usually more expensive than the initial build since the new site will usually do more than the original. A database driven content management approach allows a site to be improved incrementally simply by making changes to site templates. Such sites can evolve over time, thereby extending their "shelf life" well beyond that of static sites.


At some point even a content management site will need to be upgraded with a new and fresh visual design. Whereas static sites require a complete rebuild in these cases, content-managed sites can have a new design applied to its templates. The entire site, including all archived content, will very quickly reflect the new look and feel. This means that future site redesign projects will usually be less expensive than previous development projects, not more expensive, which is the case with static web development.


Because content management based sites are easily adaptable, you can implement all the new ideas you get for your site even after it has been completed. Often companies get great ideas for their sites very shortly after going live. This is common because it's often not until you use a site that you begin to see additional possibilities. With static sites, site-wide changes can be extremely costly, so such ideas usually get tabled until the next redesign. This means that between rebuilds there are missed opportunities that could have maximized a site's effectiveness. With database driven content managed sites, site-wide changes such as adding new sections, implementing extranets, or a host of other possibilities, can be easy integrated into the site without having to rebuild it or wait for years until a redesign becomes necessary.

Aside from the long-term cost of ownership and site flexibility issues mentioned in the previous IAQ, there are other advantages to database driven sites that make the sites themselves much more functional than a static website.


Many sites have great content, but are virtually unusable because their search features don't allow users to find content quickly or accurately. Static HTML search mechanisms are slow and inaccurate because they don't allow users to search based on information details. For instance, someone may want to find an article on a certain subject by a certain author, not necessarily all the articles that contain that author's name. These types of queries would be impossible to facilitate with a static site. Databases, on the other hand, are built for searching. One of the primary benefits of a database driven approach to web development is the advanced searching that it enables. For content rich websites, it is often the quality of the search mechanism, as much as the quality of the content itself that keeps visitors coming back.


With a database driven approach, single page templates can potentially access all the information in the site database. This allows sites to leverage the same content across a variety of site areas. For instance, you may decide to create a calendar of events on your site. With a typical static website model, the calendar would have to be maintained by hand, removing past events from HTML pages and duplicating the information by hand anywhere else on the site where the information would be useful.

Using a database driven model, each individual event would be stored as a separate entry in the database. Calendars are then dynamically generated and displayed based on the current date and time. Additionally, the information is displayed in a variety of places on the site, without needing to duplicate the calendar data.

Another common example of this advantage is displaying news items on a home page. Database driven sites can dynamically display news items with links to the detail simply by checking off a "display on home page" check box within the content management screen for that piece of content. This makes content reuse extremely simple and maintenance free.

One of the most useful capabilities of the web for business is the use of extranets. Extranets allow companies to share protected information with business partners, clients, and special customers. Extranets are one of the few examples where using the web can show a clear and measurable return on investment. Extranets also take advantage of the web's ability to share information in ways that other mediums simply cannot. It is unfortunate that complex and expensive content management issues have made it unrealistic for many companies to effectively utilize extranets. We have been able to utilize our NewfangledCMS to overcome these barriers. This has introduced our clients to some of the exciting and practical ways the web can be used to facilitate and enhance the way they do business.

Extranets can be as simple as a password-protected area where reps or business partners can access and download documents. Such pages can drastically reduce the cost of printing and distributing pricing guides, technical manuals, or other information that tends to get updated and distributed frequently. Using the web for access to this kind of information is absolutely ideal. Extranets make it really easy to keep the information current. You don't have to print and distribute it, thus saving hard dollars, and users can be confident that they are accessing the most accurate information.

It is extremely easy to find opportunities where extranets can save time and money while improving the flow of information. Extranets can be relatively easy and inexpensive to implement. More companies should be considering how they could utilize extranets to maximize their use of the web.