Websites that Work
Websites that get the job done all have certain things in common. They are...
- Content-rich.
- Easy for visitors to understand.
- Easy to navigate.
- Easy to update.
- Made from search engine friendly code.
Our job is to make sure that your website has these qualities. Your website should be secure, fast, fun to use, and useful to you and your visitors.
www.mountaindreamfinders.com, one of the core components of Colorado Land and Properties' lead generation machine. There are several other components, also database-driven, which the public never sees.
Web Content and Content Management
Content attracts visitors. Nothing else attracts visitors. Accordingly, decisions about your site's content and it's management are the most important ones you'll make.
Most of our websites, unless they are very small and basic, use a database to manage content. This has major advantages for you:
- More than likely a lot of your content (real estate listings, parts inventory, events, whatever) is already on your computer in some form that can be easily imported into a database server. This saves a lot of typing and hair-pulling.
- A database makes your site easy to maintain, because content and presentation are separated. If you need to change a price, for example, you change it just once in your database—no need to hunt through pages and pages of html code looking for every place where that price occurs.
- We create password-protected "control panels" to manage database-driven website content. This means that you can keep your site updated yourself without having to become a programmer, buy software, or hire a resident geek. It also means that your database-driven website, once it's up and running, is very easy and inexpensive to keep updated. And you'll have a better site—because who knows more about your business than you do?
- Your site is flexible. If you decide to expand it or update it's "look and feel", there's no need re-create every page, because your content is still there, stored in it's database, waiting to be "poured into" the new design.
Database technology makes the difference between a living, breathing website and a static on-line brochure that never changes. It's what makes it possible for you to offer your visitors and customers lots of content that's always fresh and always topical. It short, it's your competitive edge on the Internet.
Open Source Technology
"Open Source" software is software that is freely licensed to everyone. Anyone can download it, use it, modify it, share it with others. Some of the most powerful software in existence is released under Open Source licenses, and it has transformed the Internet.
In general, Open Source Internet applications tend to be more stable, more secure and more flexible than their "proprietary" cousins. Since the software is open, developers and system administrators throughout the world (ourselves included)—people whose livelihood depends on software that actually works—constantly examine the inner workings of mission-critical applications they deploy. Bugs tend to be found and fixed quickly, usually with hours or days. Upgrades are frequent. Even lumbering corporate beasts like Microsoft can't hire enough programmers to compete with the developer communities that grow up around applications like the Apache Web Server (which serves most of the content on the Internet), the Firefox Web Browser, or the Php Web Scripting Language.
We use Open Source technology exclusively, and this has two major advantages for you...
- You save money. The cost of software licenses is usually $0, no matter how you use it or how many people use it. Plus, there are no "license management" issues to worry about, and no annual "upgrade" fees.
- You are in control. Lots of developers and software vendors will try to "lock you in" to using their products and services with restrictive licenses and proprietary "trade secret" web standards. On the other hand, Open Source technologies are freely available to all. If you don't like the service or rates you're getting from your hosting company or webmaster, it's easy to find another one. After all, you own your site—and everyone can own the technology to run it. Forget vendor "lock in". Forget being held hostage by a greedy webmaster.
How to Harness the Power of the Web Without Having a Website
A lot businesses don't have any real content to put on the Web, but want people to be able to find them on in Internet. Does such a business really need a website?
The Internet is an incredibly powerful marketing weapon—it can connect you with customers you'd never reach any other way—but you don't necessarily have to have your own site to use it. We designed Trinidadcolorado.net in part to fill exactly this need. Check it out. If you're mainly seeking an Internet presence, it could be just what you're looking for.