What is Web Content Management?
A good Web Content Management solution makes the job of keeping your website fresh and relevant easy. ActiveBrand’s own range of SiteSphere products all use intuitive and familiar editing methods which resemble Microsoft Word. This is called WYSIWYG editing - What You See Is What You Get.
A content manager enables you to focus on your content, not on the presentation and layout. A website content manager like SiteSphere will automatically build the pages around your content and ensure visitors can navigate to your new page. This approach enables the website design to be regularly overhauled without needing to edit the content.
SiteSphere web content manager enables your content to be re-purposed. This is simply a way of saying that once the content is added, it can be re-used in many different ways. Such as creating PDF documents, showing text-only versions for visitors with disabilities, publishing links to the content for syndication via RSS.
Contribute from anywhere, anytime
One of the key benefits of using hosted web content management is that wherever you are you can access the service and make your contribution - at any time of day or night. SiteSphere hosted web content management provides a secure web-based service, where all actions are audited. Once submitted changes are instantly published for all to see. SiteSphere also supports previewing content changes for review and approval before appearing on the live website.
Search Engine Optimisation and Speed, Speed, Speed!
Once content is added to SiteSphere, the product will automatically ensure that search engines can discover it and index it in a very relevant manner. Several methods of on-page optimisation are used, such as: the title tag, META tag keyword and description information, image labelling, XHTML compliant templates with relevant header tags.
SiteSphere also automatically generates a friendly URL which reflects the contents of the content title, improving the likelihood of getting indexed under your all important phrases.
SiteSphere allows you to manage what pages are crawled by search engines (configuration of robot.txt), and also enables the creation of an XML Site Map file complying with the Sitemaps protocol, see http://www.sitemaps.org/. Creating and submitting an XML Site Map enables the search engines to know which content on your website you want it to prioritise, and how often you expect it to change. SiteSphere makes the task of creating and maintaining the XML Site Map easy, which helps ensure that search engines speedily index your content whenever it changes.
In addition, SiteSphere encourages the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and web standards like XHTML - instead of selecting fonts and colours for every line of content contributed. CSS handles those separately; you just pick the pre-defined style. Extensive use of CSS simplifies and reduces the ‘weight’ of the HTML code in your pages, and along with the advanced data caching techniques built into SiteSphere, improves the speed of the website and thereby the speed of the search engine crawling process.
Image and Asset Management
The SiteSphere content manager also provides many features to enable you to upload and manage images, videos and document files. Each file is indexed along with properties such as Subject, Author, Image Resolution, Size and Date Time Created enabling rapid location. Both RGB and CMYK image formats are supported by SiteSphere along with automatic resizing, cropping and manipulation of images.
Sections and Menus
A website is typically broken down into sections. SiteSphere enables each section to be placed in a virtual folder-style hierarchy. A section can be switched on and off at predefined times, and can map to its own page layout template enabling each section to have a different appearance or ‘feel’.
Using SiteSphere, different menus for headers, side panels and footers can be setup to link to specific sections or built dynamically. Each menu can be assigned an Access Key to ensure compliance with accessibility standards.
Web Site Search
Nearly all visitors at some point what to quickly search a website. SiteSphere has an inbuilt keyword and fuzzy search engine to enable visitors to find pages quickly. Each search phrase is tracked so it is easy to see what visitors are hunting for.
Cross Linking & Spotlighting Content
One of the benefits of SiteSphere web content management is the ability to link content items together, and mark them to be spotlighted in multiple ‘featured’ groups on a website. This enables visitors to move to related content and also products with great ease, and improves the ‘stickiness’ of the website, that is the amount of time the visitor stays to browse.
Commenting, Ratings, Polls and Surveys
Web site visitors expect to contribute their own feedback on your content. SiteSphere provides a simple method to allow them comment on pages, and submit a star rating. Quick polls and surveys are also effective ways to gather useful information, and today’s web user enjoys interacting in these informal ways. SiteSphere’s rating, quick poll and straightforward web survey features enable you to engage visitors in these useful ways.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge is Power, and if so then why not empower your website to provide customers with automatic answers to their questions on products or services? SiteSphere Knowledge Tree is a powerful tool enabling question and answer-type knowledge trees to be built using a simple flowchart method over the web. These knowledge trees are easily updated and can be used to answer any type of question sequence.
Advert Management
Getting a return on your website investment sometimes requires monetising the site with third-party advertising space. Using the SiteSphere Advert Manager you can setup text, image or video-based adverts for automatic delivery within the advert regions you have defined on your page templates. Every click is tracked and can be exported in Excel for detailed analysis.
SiteSphere Advert Manager is designed to handle both external links and also internal - so any website content can be advertised wherever you like right across the website.
Enquiry Log, Contact Management and Email Marketing with E-Flyers
Generating more sales is a key outcome for any website, and SiteSphere goes all the way to provide for simple and complex enquiry capture.
The Contact Manager within SiteSphere enables you to add new fields onto a contact record and import/export to Microsoft Excel with ease. Each contact can have multiple classifications, and these can be used target email campaigns.
The SiteSphere Marketer solution enables the rapid creation of new editions of your company’s e-flyer, featuring content on your website. The e-flyer template is fully customisable, and ensures a professional appearance when delivered. Bounce-back and out-of-office, email opening and click-through tracking, are all features of the SiteSphere email marketing solution.
Secure, Password-Protected Areas
Making private content areas within your website for members or partners is a simple task using the SiteSphere Security Manager. Each area can be assigned multiple security groups and new users can be created and assigned to these groups with or without manual approval. Each user is assigned a security policy and this will determine their password expiry period and can also set their login expiry period, useful for annual membership renewals.
Feeds, Content Syndication, Social Networking
A website is part of the whole World Wide Web ecosystem, and is expected to function in synergy with other websites. Technologies like RSS enable interested parties to pull content from your site and be automatically updated with changes. Social networking sites can provide all-important Back-Links which in turn improve your search engine position, so it is important that a web content management solution like SiteSphere provides easy options for enabling visitors to your site link into their favourite social networking website.
SiteSphere XML Connector is a very useful tool for any SiteSphere content that you wish to submit or retrieve in XML format, it enables you to share content via Web Services or REST-style interfaces, and enables easy and widespread integration of content with Microsoft SharePoint and linking contacts and enquiries with Microsoft CRM, Microsoft BizTalk and SAP Business One, and any other system where an XML interface can be used.
Browser Testing and Compatibility
New web browsers and upgraded versions are always appearing. SiteSphere enables your website to use standards such as XHTML for the widest possible compatibility across web browsers such as Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, FireFox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome. This covers over 99% of the user base.
Browser Market Share (January 2009): Internet Explorer 82%, FireFox 13%, Safari/Opera/Google Chrome 3%.
Reporting & Analytics
Tracking and analysing website activity is a vital area for any organisation or business who wishes to monitor the effectiveness of their website. SiteSphere has built-in visit tracking features and reporting with Excel export, and on-page charting. Key metrics available are: content popularity, enquiries generated, visitor location, etc.
SiteSphere also supports Google Analytics, a powerful free web site tracking and reporting service which can be easily added to any website.
Beyond Content Management
Most web content management solutions stop at content management. Whilst SiteSphere is a CMS, it also extends well beyond this area. It also provides fully integrated ecommerce and publishing features, and has been customised for use in many different industry areas.