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Do you run a blog or use wordpress for your CMS? Do you have an iPhone, Blackberry, Android or some new Nokias?

If so then you should seriously look at getting the app for WordPress. Updating your wordpress site has just become easy and what’s more, if your out and about you have an idea fire up the app and post away. In fact I’m doing it now.

What I like most about this app is the 3 step set up process.

1: Login to your admin area and navigate to Settings > Writing and enable XML-RPC. (101 clients using the 101 All in one CMS solution, this is enabled by default.)
2: Download and install the WordPress app from your relevant app library.
3: Point the app at your WordPress install type in your details and post away.

From the app you can manage, comments, posts, pages, media and it even supports Geo-tagging. The published status is available for scheduled publishing, saving a local draft, or saving a draft to WordPress.

Couple of things so far:
No HTML view. Alot of the time our clients have problems with their content and it’s HTML related. This would not be a feature utilised by the majority, but on I thought would be great.

No access to the plugins, though again would a majority of users need it? All-in-one SEO is one plugin that I think would be great to have access to. Most of the others especially in the 101 CMS solution look after themselves.

No rich text editing or linking to other pages.

Permalinks don’t seem to be available which again is only minor as majority of our users set and forget, leaving the product to take care of them.

All in all this app is great for getting the content into the blog quickly and easily. Its quite purposely designed to not be everything for every one and stays true to the emphasis on simplicity, which is what lead 101 to use it to base our CMS solution on.

If you have all the ingredients I recommend trying it out for your self. You may just find your not tied to that desk any more. (at least for the simple things any way.)

When building a new or re-developing an existing website, there is one question we at 101 Web Technology always ask our client.

How much time do you have available to keep this website updated?

As I have written about in other articles “Keeping your site fresh” and “Whats your site up to?” we know that keeping a website regularly maintained is like servicing your car. Yes it will run with old oil and half worn tyres. The old faithful will still get you to the shops and home, drop the kids at school. However would you trust the car to take you around Australia? Some would, though we wouldn’t.

The fact is if you want your website to go the extra miles and really give you a return on investment, then you need to invest into the site yourself. The biggest investment as business owners is time. Time is the one factor that is not tax deductible, time is one factor that you can’t make back. As business owners we do tend to like to save costs and think, yes we can do it ourselves, but are we going to do the same job as a professional? Are we going to remember to dot the i’s and cross the t’s?

When updating a website it is often not only a matter of making the small content changes, but having a holistic view and understanding of your web presence? Updating your content is only a very small part of keeping your website finely tuned. I liken it to changing your cars oil and not using a new filter. Yes you have new oil, but is it effective as it could be?

Keeping a website finely tuned does take time and effort. A Content Management System (CMS) is a great tool to get you off and running updating your own website content with little to no web programming skills and yes its true, if you want simple updates to your site, making them yourself makes sense. However what we find is our clients don’t have time to update the website themselves, we find their websites haven’t been touched sometimes over 24months since we launched the site. Would you not have serviced your car at least once in that same amount of time? In comparison clients making use of our website maintenance packages are more proactive with site updates, usually an email is sent with images, Word or PDF attachments with instructions on what they want the new/updated page to look like. Updates are made within 24hours of the request and the client has saved themselves the time and effort by having the professional look after their website. The client knows that their search engine ranking is being considered by a professional after each change, the site will be 100% error free. Simply it just works the best it can and your site has been tuned.

101 Fact: 9 out of 10 CMS we have deployed (good mix of both Joomla, WordPress and Adobe Contribute), due to time constraints we end up making the changes on behalf of the client.

While these CMS products are great at what they do there are limitations on them and a good web development company will be able to let you know what those limitations are and provide you a range of options that best suit your requirements, budget and availability of time.