It’s a bit like asking “what is the best hammer for me?” Well, what are you going to be doing with that hammer? Are you framing out a two story house or putting up a picture frame? Those are two very different tasks, and two hammers that would be a “best fit.”

There are two main kinds of CMS: open source and custom. Both allow you to easily manage content, media, and users. Both are stable, secure, and scalable for future growth. However, each have their benefits and drawbacks:

Open Source CMS

• Definition: software created by a community of developers , free to use and adapt to your purposes
• Benefits: extensive documentation, countless modules, easy to find developers
• Drawbacks: website pages load slower (more queries), one size fits all approach limits customization, complicated administration area includes unused features
• Options: Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress (all on PHP)

Custom

• Definition: CMS which is constructed around your specific task, workflow, or technology requirements
• Benefits: faster page loads (fewer queries), everything you want and nothing you do not
• Drawbacks: no extra features
• Options: Keep it Simple CMS

What feature or characteristic is most important to you?

• If you want open source software, extensive documentation, a community of developers: Drupal or Joomla
• If you want the site completely customized to your workflow, quick loading pages for visitors: KIS

eye9 Design is a Colorado web design company providing website design and web development services to clients in the Denver metro area and across the nation.

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A website has become one of the primary modes of communication in today’s business world. It has many advantages, including

• Omnipresent: a website is not limited by geography or time zones, and can be accessed 24/7 by visitors around the world
• Transient: did you decide you want to change that marketing tagline? Found a typo in that press release? You can change content and, unlike brochures or signage, it is instantaneously available to the world

However, there are a couple challenges that companies often face

• Expertise: websites are written in coding languages that most people cannot effectively use
• Frequency: website content has a notoriously short shelf life, and needs to be updated regularly to stay fresh
• Budget: paying web designer fees to upload a press release can be a drain on your budget

Content Management Systems eliminate these barriers. They allow anyone to update the website without technical knowledge, allowing more people throughout your organization to have a role in keeping your website up to date. It also allows you to focus your technology on investing in new web development features or increasing your search engine rankings.

We have covered “What is a CMS ” and “Why you need a CMS.” In the final part of this series we cover “What is the best Content Management System? ”

eye9 Design is a leading Denver website development company .

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Sometimes metaphors are helpful to explain concepts more clearly. Let’s say you need to get from Denver to Phoenix, so you need a car. Toyota has spent millions of dollars in R&D to make sure the car is dependable, efficient, and easy to drive. You may never understand the principles of aerodynamics or torque. However, if you can push the gas pedal (and the brake!) and steer the car, you do not need to understand all that.

Just like your investment in a car allows you the benefit of easy transportation, a content management system allows you to manage a website without any programming knowledge. Like Toyota, developers have spent countless hours developing dependable, efficient CMS that are easy to use. Similar to the car example above, you do not need to understand the technical principles behind the tool. You just need to know how type some text, insert a picture, or upload a file…basic tasks you likely perform every day on your PC!

Now that you know what a CMS is, check out part 2 of this series: Why you need a content management system .

eye9 Design is a leading Denver design firm .

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Need a new brand? eye9 Design is a leading Colorado graphic design company that helps companies create logos based on their unique values, target demographic, and position in their business space.

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A consortium of the two dozen leading SEO professionals ranked the 10 most important Google ranking factors . Here they are, with on-page factors in bold , and off-page factors in italics.

• Keyword Use in Title Tag
• Anchor Text of Inbound Link
• Global Link Popularity of Site
• Age of Site (neither on-page or off-page)
• Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
• Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to site
• Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
• Keyword Use in Body Text
• Global Link Popularity of Linking Page
• Topical Relationship of Linking Page

We address all of these factors thoroughly with our complete seo optimization packages . Contact us today about search engine optimization for your website.

eye9 Design is a leading Colorado SEO company providing effective seo optimization services.

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One of the most significant hardware changes in the last 5 years is the ever-increasing screen resolution (measured in pixels, such as 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high). Big, bulky CRT monitors have given way to sleek, thin flat-panel LCD’s . With this transition, screen resolutions have also changed, most notably the emergence of 1024×768 and the disappearance of 800×600.

W3C Schools, part of the main international web standards organization (W3C) , reported that in 2003 almost half of its visitors were on the 800×600 screen resolution. That number has now dropped to 8%. The statistics for our website for 2008 put the number even lower at 2%.

Since both of the above statistics are for sites in the web design industry, I looked at the statistics for 2008 for several of our clients in a variety of industries

• Printing company for financial industry: 3%
• Non-profit serving the disabled: 6%
• Business management consulting firm: 3%
• Marine exploration company: 6%

Why is this important? Size matters because increased website widths allow for the user to see more content without scrolling down the page. As you can see above, throughout a variety of industries the 800×600 screen resolution is fading into obscurity. We recommend the 1024×768 resolution to all our web design and website development clients in order to “future-proof” the sites as much as possible.

Are there larger screen resolutions coming? Of course! In fact, some 70% of our visitors have screen resolutions greater than (and not equal to) 1024×768. However, on other site reports we looked at 1024×768 is as much as half of the traffic and this resolution does not show signs of disappearing soon.

This Denver design firm calls the browser wars in favor of 1024×768!

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In a previous post we discussed our two-pronged search engine optimization (SEO) strategy: on-page and off-page optimization . There is a third prong, under search engine marketing (SEM) , called “Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC).” These three prongs comprise a complete search engine marketing strategy.

However, if you have a limited budget, how should you prioritize? In this graph we demonstrate our recommendations for a campaign with a minimum timeline of 6 months. Why 6 months or above? Using an analogy…

• Search engine optimization is like taking $100 and buying an apple tree seedling. You will need to spend time cultivating the tree so it will bear fruit. Once it does, you will have a constant and ever increasing supply of apples.
• Search engine marketing is like taking $100 and buying apples. You can buy alot of apples, and begin eating them immediately. However, when they are gone…they are gone forever.

So how does this apply to search engine marketing? Doing on-page and off-page optimization (SEO) and pay per click advertising (SEM) allows you to experience the best of all worlds. Pay per click gives you an immediate and measurable traffic boost, while at the same time your on-page and off-page optimization is laying the foundation for long term success. In fact, once your rankings have improved through optimization, you may no longer need to use PPC.

Have further questions about SEO optimization? Ask a leading Colorado SEO Company , eye9 Design .

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So it begs the question…what is good design worth? What would you pay for a website that attracts new visitors, reflects your company’s unique values, and converts visitors into customers?

Here is what one customer had to say about what our design means to her small business.

The most impressive thing about working with eye9 is their ability to respond to my requests and develop a site based on my personal design tastes. Not only is the site aestheically pleasing, but it also suits the needs of my small business
Keri Welch, MementobyKeri.com

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When I began working with eye9 Design I had a pretty specific idea in mind. In the end, they far exceeded my expectations. People are amazed when they look at the site! Thank you for working so hard to perfect our website. You guys rock!
Jessica Yost, T. Garrett Construction

As one of the leading Colorado web design companies, our process-driven design achieves results every time. We start by listening to your needs, and have you fill out a web design questionnaire that gets at the purpose of the website, and who you are trying to reach. It also helps understand your website design preferences, so that we start off the project in the right direction.

Contact us today about redesigning your website!

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Off-page optimization is gathering quality links to your website using those same keywords in the link (anchor) text. This step is often neglected by many clients we speak with. However, off-page optimization is as important as on-page, if not more so. The quality and quantity of links from external websites, called “inbound links,” is paramount. If you look at the SEO industry consensus, the half of the to 10 factors have to do with inbound links.

Here is practical advice on how to gather internal links

• Send individually addressed emails to your colleagues, friends, vendors, and clients. Let them know about your newly optimized site, and ask them if they would link to your site.
• Tell them what you would like the link to say. This is extremely important. Let’s say one of your top keywords is “Denver ski shop.” When you ask your friends to link to your site, say: “The words used in the link itself are important to search engines because indicates what my site is about. So please use the phrase ‘Denver ski shop’ as the link to my site http://www.example.com.”
• As a general rule, avoid link farms and paid links. Natural links from colleagues and clients are more…well, natural. Search engines are always tweaking their results to reward real, natural, quality links.
• Utilize our link building services: we provide link building services to our clients through our partnership with one of the top 10 link building companies in the world. Your links are obtained from the right partners based on a thorough research of your competitors and potential business market space. We also keep in mind these quality guidelines
  • No Frame Sites
  • No Java script pages
  • No link farms
  • No redirected sites
  • No sub-domain sites
  • Keywords in anchor text

This comprehensive, two-pronged approach has helped us get a variety of clients and keywords into the top ten of Google search engine results pages. Contact us today about optimizing your site for maximum search engine penetration.

eye9 Design is a leading Denver, Colorado SEO company providing affordable web site search engine optimization to clients across the nation.

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