services: content management systems
Beats Letting the Content Manage You, Doesn’t It?
relevancy score: 2.3 out of 10.0
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Here at Liquid Anvil, we’ve developed literally hundreds of templates across a wide variety of systems. Your template can be as unique as your company or application. And it can be designed to integrate with your entire marketing focus.
We’re also large proponents of integrated approaches – specifically, using a content management system to the greatest of its abilities, and then extending that fuctionality with applications integrated directly into the site. We’re also known to take a dynamic system apart and author better solutions internally, including catalog, menu and community systems. You can view a sampling of our work in our portfolio.
The Liquid Anvil Content Management System Tao
We Don’t Have “A System”
We’ve developed in a range of systems in both the Open Source [meaning, free] and Proprietary [meaning definitively not free] classes. There are over 200 of them out there – and they all have their purpose, with the rare exception that should be scourged from the planet.
What this means is that we’re not locked into any specific solution – and that we’re not going to try to squeeze your square peg of a project into that particular round hole. What we are going to do is look at what your undertaking needs and give you what we think is the best fit – or a range of them.
What this means is that we’re not locked into any specific solution – and that we’re not going to try to squeeze your square peg of a project into that particular round hole. What we are going to do is look at what your undertaking needs and give you what we think is the best fit – or a range of them.
So What Systems Do You Work In?
Frankly, we’ll work with anything – if we don’t know it, we’ll learn it. [Ask us about SilverStripe; we’re learning that one now at client request.] We will admit to having a few favorite solutions, however:
- Joomla!: One of the big burners of the Open Source field, Joomla! is easy to deploy, the platform is robust and flexible, hosting is cheap, there’s a huge development community and it’s great to work in. Pain in the tuchus to learn for the neophyte; the interface is kludgey at best.
- Drupal: Same as Joomla!, but with extra kludge added free of charge in our experience.
- MODx: You might be sensing a trend here, kludge coefficient-wise.
- WordPress: Great if you blog, and can be extended for a variety of purposes if you don’t. We recommend you don’t. Although the backend makes sense to a non-geek, your development costs have just gone up – and you can have exactly one theme.
- B2Evolution: Great if you blog. Period. We generally integrate it into sites that need a blog, rather than the other way ’round.
- SilverStripe: We’re just now learning this one, so get back to us. The user administration system makes sense for beginners, though.
- Magento: The 800 pound gorilla of Open Source ecommerce. Big heap medicine, extensible and flexible – and if you need to go full on wicked, you can always upgrade to the paid enterprise edition. But unless you’re going to sell and sell big and Open Source, you don’t need it.
- Business Catalyst: Properietary, multi-use content management from the lovely folks at Adobe, and designed ground-up for ecommerce and easy deployment. Hands down the easiest-to-use administration functionality we’ve seen, and wicked good Customer Relationship Management functionality. But you can forget about customizing the guts; what you see is what you get.
- SohoLaunch: We’ve worked extensively in the proprietary versions known as SMT Pro and SMT Owasted. [And let us state now we’re not bashing on the lovely folks at Soho the company; this is about SMT & Owasted.] If you’re trapped in this crap, we can probably fix it – we fixed a lot of them. Best fix is getting you the hell out of it.
- Homegrowns: We’ve worked with a number of homegrown systems down through the millenia [subjective time] the web has been around – and some of them are quite good – but they tend to be special purpose rigs. If you’ve got a special purpose we think fits, we’ll go that route. Henh. We used “special purpose” and got away with it.
Oh, Wait. We Do Have “A System”
Liquid Anvil recently acquired WebSimpler, a Business Catalyst reseller & developer. We did this because we:
- Like Business Catalyst. It’s pretty neat stuff, and we’ve developed a number of sites for other clients [under contract] in it.
- Like the user interface, particularly for clients that want to manage their own site and don't have time for another college degree.
- Like the ease of deployment. We were able to do an emergency rollout for a client, boots up, with extensive content, a custom template, customer tracking, newsletters and commerce functionality in a weekend. Admittedly, afterwards we shut the shop down for a couple of days and blew spit bubbles on the couch, but still...
- Hated what we – and our clients we thought Business Catalyst was a fit for – were paying for hosting. Now we can offer it at or near cost.
Do You Put Everything in a CMS?
Nope. But using a Content Management System – whatever it may be – is our default position for a variety of reasons.
If we determine your application doesn’t need, want or won’t bloody work in a CMS, we’re not going to stick you in one. Content Management Systems are becoming increasingly more powerful, flexible and thought out – with the exception of the interface and the page editors, alas. Unless you’re building something custom that can be repurposed to alter the orbit of the moon from a desktop widget, however, there’s often little reason to not consider a CMS.
If we determine your application doesn’t need, want or won’t bloody work in a CMS, we’re not going to stick you in one. Content Management Systems are becoming increasingly more powerful, flexible and thought out – with the exception of the interface and the page editors, alas. Unless you’re building something custom that can be repurposed to alter the orbit of the moon from a desktop widget, however, there’s often little reason to not consider a CMS.
Can I Manage My Own Content with a CMS?
Yes. And no.
No system on the planet – or off it, so far as we know – is going to let you author HTML without at least some basic training. You're going to have to learn why and what tags open and close – and what a tag even is, for that matter. If you’ve got something really snazzy going on, breaking things gets easy fast. Plus, no matter what CMS you’re in, there’s going to be some sort of learning curve.
That being said, there’s no reason you can’t learn to drive your own CMS. And we’re happy to train you how to do it.
No system on the planet – or off it, so far as we know – is going to let you author HTML without at least some basic training. You're going to have to learn why and what tags open and close – and what a tag even is, for that matter. If you’ve got something really snazzy going on, breaking things gets easy fast. Plus, no matter what CMS you’re in, there’s going to be some sort of learning curve.
That being said, there’s no reason you can’t learn to drive your own CMS. And we’re happy to train you how to do it.
Will a CMS Save Me Money?
Short answer? Yes.
So long as we’re not having to bend a CMS to fit your evil will [“Well, I’d like to run a global distribution network with B2B capability and direct links to my Point of Sale and Inventory Control Systems that are running on an AS400 – but it has to have a WordPress interface...”], a Content Management System will save you money – even if we’re the ones driving it for you.
Why? Because the content is managed. We don’t have to go all old school, managing changes across a site using a grep via FTP or invoke other authentic frontier gibberish. We just go in and manage the content. Our time’s less, so your bill is less.
So long as we’re not having to bend a CMS to fit your evil will [“Well, I’d like to run a global distribution network with B2B capability and direct links to my Point of Sale and Inventory Control Systems that are running on an AS400 – but it has to have a WordPress interface...”], a Content Management System will save you money – even if we’re the ones driving it for you.
Why? Because the content is managed. We don’t have to go all old school, managing changes across a site using a grep via FTP or invoke other authentic frontier gibberish. We just go in and manage the content. Our time’s less, so your bill is less.
So if You Don’t Use a CMS, What Do You Do?
Generally? A PHP “wrapper”, with links out to customized, specialized systems and using code blocks we’ve developed for unique purposes. That’s how this site is built, for example.
Didn’t make any sense? Don’t worry about it. Basically, this site is just one huge custom application that we keep bolting pieces on as we see a need; in some ways it’s the equivalent of a Cadillac built by Johnny Cash. If you need that sort of application, we can build it – we did it for ourselves, no less.
Didn’t make any sense? Don’t worry about it. Basically, this site is just one huge custom application that we keep bolting pieces on as we see a need; in some ways it’s the equivalent of a Cadillac built by Johnny Cash. If you need that sort of application, we can build it – we did it for ourselves, no less.
Yes, This Is What We Do All Day
At Liquid Anvil we are, not to put too fine a point on it, experts in Content Management Systems. And we’ll put you in the one that fits your needs – not the one we bought a used book about on Amazon – if one does actually fit your needs.Why Choose Us?
Range. Liquid Anvil doesn’t just offer you a web site or a t-shirt and close the account. We provide an unparalleled number of marketing services, along with the know-how and experience to knit your campaign into a cohesive whole. Whether it be print collateral, promotional products, search engine optimization, logo development, site tuning or corporate apparel, we can handle it - and more.Don’t worry if you don’t need a fully projected, international multimedia marketing initiative and just want a set of cool pens with your name on it; we’re geared for that too.
When you are ready to strive for world domination, we’ll be here. And we’ve already got some ideas. Please take a moment and look over our full services list to see what Liquid Anvil can do for you.
What Our Clients Are Saying…
What makes Liquid Anvil stand out is their attention to our needs - we are not just ‘another trouble ticket’. Even more critically they offer solutions. We can’t imagine anyone better to partner with, knowing they are not only the foundation of our success, but will be there when we need them.Dawn Robuck,
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