Website Solutions For The Non-Technical

If you don't want to learn to build your own websites, and would rather find someone else to do it, there are a few ways you can go, depending on the level of involvement you want...

For a totally hands-off approach - contact us. We provide a fully-managed website service - you just provide the content.

A content management system (CMS) provides a 'user-friendly' interface allowing the user to create the content, look, and functionality of their site - all (potentially) without programming a thing...

CMSs are big business these days. According to CMSWatch there are about 700 products available today which call themselves 'Content Management Systems'! It's a wide market with many different approaches - from Windows applications which allow an individual to edit their website on the server, to enterprise-sized, highly-engineered combined client/server applications.

You can pay $10,000s for a corporate CMS, $100s for a mid-range one, or get any of the open-source CMS's for free. All have their place in the big scheme of things...

Websites are a diverse bunch. The web front-end hides an incredible variety of systems, protocols, programming languages, and toolsets, and there's no single CMS which is perfect for everyone. Running a search engine is very different from a dating website, or a corporate intranet...

Commercial Content Management Systems

• WebEdit Professional is a cool product. It's a WYSIWYG editor that you use to create your pages and it can access files remotely via FTP. It's main selling point is that it's rebrandable, so web developers can build the website, then give the software itself to the customer - and they use it as a content management system. In it's rebranded/CMS mode, it can have access to the website's code restricted!
  
  
• SiteWorksPro is a complete site management system. It's MySQL/PHP of course...
  
  

Free Content Management Systems

• TC! FREE Content Management System is our own, fast and powerful CMS. It's approach is different from most in that it doesn't try to hide your code from you - this makes it far more flexible and faster than similar products. TC! also has an ecommerce plug-in which enables instant, automatic-fulfillment, subscriptions, cart, affiliates.
  
  
• PostNuke which is based on PHP-Nuke. It has great functionality, a thriving community and loads of great 'themes' available for it. See the page on PHP IDEs for details on IBServer which will install PHP-Nuke onto your PC. Check out this online manual for PHP-Nuke if you're interested in learning what it can do.
  
  
• TYPO3 is a full featured open-source CMS based on MySQL and PHP. Looks good, but it's big and complex and I'm afraid I found it rather slow.
  
  
• opensourcecms.com Try out all the open source CMSs live, online!
  
  
• A list of open source CMS projects.
  
  
  

For a totally hands-off approach - contact us. We provide a fully-managed website service: Top-Cat Web Design using our own CMS (TC!). You just provide the content.

These are the least involvement solution - the host does pretty much everything for you, you just have to enter all your content. Content crucially include setting keywords SiteSell.com has the best tools for helping you choose your keywords I've seen. For more info on keywords see the page on coming up with your site's keywords / description.

It's important to realise that if you hire a human web-developer you will still have to do all the work you'll have to do here. Only you can write your content!

• SiteSell
  
  SiteSell have an integrated system of webhosting with an online, forms-based website builder called 'SiteBuildIt'. The package includes two outstanding features:
  
  
  • Keyword Manager. Tabulates keywords supply, demand and alternatives - automatically - potentially saving a lot of time / money.
    
    
  • Search Engine Manager. Automatically submits your site, then checks for spider visits and re-submits if the site isn't being indexed. Includes a page optimiser to give suggestions on improving your ranking.
    
    
  It costs $299/year for the whole package ($24.10/month).
  
  
  
• 123TurnKey.com
  
  Completely non-technical, guided website builder program. Choose from various templates. Change colours, fonts, text and images with a point and click interface. Flash, animated graphics & intros.
  
  $19.95 sign-up fee, then $19.95 per month. Includes a sub-domain, real domain is $10 extra one-off payment.
  
  
  
• BuilderSpot.
  
  Build a business website in 5 minutes. No programming required. MSWord like editor. Over 200 templates.
  
  $19.98/month Hosting and domain inc.
  
  
  
• ReadyWebsites
  
  New Website builder that allows you to build your own site in just 5 minutes. No programming required. (Non-commercial version of BuilderSpot.)
  
  $8.88/month
  
  
  
• More coming... Please email your suggestions.