CleverStart

Maintaining and developing a website can be daunting to many people, while others look at it as an opportunity. Long gone are the days where your site will consist of 5-50 static (pages that never change) pages that just redirect each other around with a simple navigation or two. With today’s technology people are wanting a website that is dynamic and can grow as you do. Something that they can maintain and develop themselves instead of having to be tied to a web developer that may take a day or two for simple changes. Why not just change it yourself and have complete control over your own site?

Well your in luck because I am going to go over some features of my favorite content management system and some key items that you should be looking for when deciding on which CMS will be perfect for you.

1. Is it simple to use? Meaning do you have a series of steps that "must" be followed in order to make something work, or can you do what you want quickly and in any order you want to.

Wow, you can manage posts (or new articles), your pages and everything else with no prerequiste steps. This is the simplest and easiest to use CMS menu I could find, and I have installed 15+ different ones over the last year. Passed my simplicity test with flying colors.

2. Do you have to know html/css/ how to code something? The average user has no idea on how to do this, why try to force them to learn something just to write a new page or article? So the second test is, does it have a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, where you can write, format and use images/flash files with no prior knowledge?

Looking at this easy to use menu, I can change text, font, alignment, add hyperlinks and a ton more. Close to the right side is a spot to upload flash files and images right to the server, and once uploaded it even fills out the details so you can just enter them right into your article. Once again this CMS has passed my WYSIWYG editor with some added bonuses such as spellcheck and the ability to add source code to the article if you do happen to know how to code with html/css.

3. Can you change your theme or website design on your own? My third test is whether or not you can change the design/theme on your own. So you updated a logo or want to change how something looks on your own real quick?

So far so good, I can change the theme/design and it looks like I can go in and edit the theme itself and make changes. But we haven’t passed this test yet, can I change that logo or design within the CMS?

Test passed. I can change the logo with ease, not only can I upload it through the admin section but I can also go right in and change it from the file itself. This is a key test to pass because it means that you will be able to support yourself with changes and your site will be able to adapt to any changes with no problem.

Are you excited yet? I love this CMS and it’s simple ways to do things without following procedures or steps. And on top of that, the user is empowered because they have full control over their website and how it is managed.

This concludes part 1, but this will be a three part article that will cover many different aspects of a CMS and how to rate them.

As always if you want more information about this CMS or anything else, just head over to CleverStart.com and give us a shout.

This summers Olympics truly set a lot of records including the amount of people that watched a single show on the internet. More than 40 million people went to NBC’s website coverage of the Olympics. This is huge for Microsoft because everyone that went to the site to watch the Olympics needed Microsoft’s Silverlight program to watch the videos. But this is also huge for technology because it shows that more and more people are looking to their computers for entertainment, including television.

You should check it out, it was really neat because you could watch up to four events at the same time and even have a separate commentary while you are watching. I was amazed at how far online video technology has come in the last year. It was a great show for Microsoft and their strategy to expand into SAAS or software as a service.

Long gone are the days of static web pages on the Internet. In fact there is a large war on the Internet for which technology will ultimately became the standard for the Internet.

In one corner we have Adobe’s flash, which was originally for web videos, but has worked it’s way into whole sites being designed with flash. With Flash’s integration in Microsoft silver light, it would seem that Adobe is quickly becoming more and more used. Internet Explorer is still the primary web browser, so Adobe stands to gain a huge portion of the market just from this partnership.

In the second corner we have HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, and this is the backbone of the Internet and has been for many years. Almost every page live today uses HTML in one form or another. Our browsers are built around this technology and have been since their conception. Javascript and AJAX were almost completely built around HTML and javascript is the most widely used scripting language on the internet. Recently Java has been vastly updated and revamped for modern technology, and javascript isn’t going anywhere. Ajax is also catching on very quickly and has been building steam for the last three or four years, I see AJAX growing faster than ever and there are no signs that this progress will halt anytime soon.

While it would be nearly impossible to say for certain which technology will win the web development war, many companies are investing millions of dollars into technology that has a huge impact on this.

If your hiring people to build a new project, you need to invest some serious time into choosing your technology. If you pick the wrong one your application will be outdated before it is finished and will become a relic of the past. This could mean the difference between making a good investment or wasting thousands of dollars for something that will never pay off.

This choice can be very difficult and time consuming, CleverStart is here to help you make that choice and implement it.

If you ever worked for a technical company, one of the first things that they may have you do is sign a non-compete which pretty much states that you will not work for a competitor or solicit the companies employees if you quit or are fired. One thought that always went through my mind is that they really can not control you when you leave the company. If you quit or get fired, the previous company has no right to tell you who you can or can not get employment from. But how would this hold up legally?

It doesn’t and is a really a relic from the dot-com boom when companies on the cutting edge wanted a way to keep their employees. What it meant then was that a company like Microsoft could safely hire people to make technology for them and have a way to ensure that technology would stay private or unique.

At one of my former employees, their non-compete stated that you couldn’t hire someone that quit after you did for a period of one year! A buddy and I started my first company and we both worked at this place of employment. So when we read this, we were like how are we going to do this? One of us would be technically hired by the other and thus directly violating the non-compete. Well after talking to our lawyer, the simple solution was to quit on the same day and at the same time. Thus making that part of the non-compete invalid since we were both unemployed at the same time.

In the last week, California Supreme Court ruled that companies can not restrict employees from employment. So this means that the non-compete is now pretty useless when it comes to hiring or firing.

As it stands now, a non-compete is still useful when signing them with contractors but will that be going away soon? If CleverStart builds a restaurant application for a client and signs a non-compete, according to California that non-compete is void and that restaurant can not prevent me from future employment.

While California is the only state at the moment to enforce this, I see this spreading to the rest of the US soon.

You can read more about this at: news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10010724-92.html