Top 10 Reasons to get a custom designed web site over a CMS (content management system)

The utilization of CMS systems such as Joomla and phpnuke wordpress and several other has become more and more popular in recent history. The major reason for this is that these software's provide the site owners with the ability to make small alterations to the site on their own within little or even no web design or coding knowledge. while this may sound like an ideal solution to some of you I'm going to outline the top 10 reasons that you may wanna reconsider.
1. customization: Right off the bat we hit a wall, CMS sites are laid out in templates the templates unfortunately are based on the designer of the templates assessment of what is a logical layout for a website. this is not to say that they are doing a bad job, but they have to the best they can to create a "one size fits all" solution. What this means is that there will be spaces and section of the layout that are intended for content that you may simply not have as part of your website, this leaves you with no choice but to either come up with extra content to fill the template or cut some of your content to fit the template. over all you will have to fluff or trim your intended content to fit the template.
2. Animated elements: right now the only way to achieve advance animated effects is to use either flash or jquiry and Css. with template based CMS systems you have a very limited ability to enter code of your own so the animated elements available to you are extremely limited. some of these systems have animated templates built into them that allow you to enter a couple images and text and it will animate it for you but you really have no creative control over how it looks and how the animation behaves.
3. Difficulty: this is one of the biggest reasons that I don't recommend CMS systems. 9 times out of 10 people choose a CMS system to save money. they don't want to pay a web designer to create a custom site and they don't want to pay for updates and things like that after they have a site. the issue is however that CMS systems often time are very difficult to use when making alterations that are more complicated than just text or images so after all is said and done you need to get a web designer anyway.
4. limitations: here's another big one, as I said before CMS systems have templates that determines what goes where and something so simple as you wanting to move a menu from the right side of the pages main text to the left in some cases require that you download and install a whole new template and start from scratch to achieve.
5. analytics: there are many free site services such as Google analytics that allow you to track you websites visitors and traffic quite nicely and effectively these are services that allow you to set up an account and then they provide you with code that you place into your site that allows the service to communicate with your site to gather this information. there are ways to get this code into your CMS web site but when you actually see how it's done it often times is a back door or work around, basically a way of fooling your CMS into accepting the code that Google or other service provider gives you. now I'm not saying that these workarounds don't work but it seems a little sketchy that you would have to essentially lie to your website to make it work. imagine the tech equivalent of duct tape ad twine.
6. SEO: Search engine optimization this is the term for the code and techniques used to make your site show up on search engines whenever someone searches for a term that encompasses something related to your site. for example if you were a plumber you'd want your site SEO to make you show up when someone goggles plumbing or leaky pipes etc. I have been hired on many occasions to do SEO on CMS systems and let me tell you it's a pain in the butt a lot of CMS systems have places you can enter keywords and the text editors have the abilities to use title tags and H tags but there seems to be some kind of lag to the terms you add taking effect and as a result you have a very un sure situation when it comes to an effective SEO campaign.
7. Social Media: This is a huge feature of a successful site and as social media gets more and more popular there are more and more tools and methods of incorporating social media into your site in order to create a social and web presents for your site in tandem. but yet again here we are with the good old code issue, the CMS systems as we discussed in earlier points only allow limited code implantation and its always in html. most of the methods used to take advantage of your social media accounts are widgets and buttons that utilize JavaScript and in the case of face book arguably the most popular social media avenue Facebook uses a proprietary language FBML also won't work in a CMS
8. hosting: in addition to all the other reasons and the supposed savings in using CMS a lot of people don't know that CMS systems need special hosting because the CMS software has specific structures and folders that need to be present in the correct placement for the CMS to function. basically you might have to buy a new hosting package to accommodate your CMS
9. Cost: While the CMS you use may be cheap or even free when you need to get new templates or modules for the CMS those often time do cost money in addition to the hosting cost mention in the last point
10. Cutting corners: The final point I'd like to make is this. if you need a website then go to a real web designer. your web site is extremely important to your business why would you consider not using a professional ? when your home Air conditioner goes out you call a qualified repaid person, when your car has an issue you call a mechanic why? because you aren't a mechanic and you aren't a AC tech you need the job done right and you recognize that you don't know how and the attempts you make as an un trained and un qualified tech can actually cause more damage and cost much more money than if you had yield to the professionals . web sites are no different.


Please check us out on facebook and twitter and on our site at www.webstudio914.com

Css3 Rounded Edges

Facebook and Twitter working together .

There are a lot of different items to touch on here so this may end up taking more than one posting to cover.

First of all let's start off with the simple and logical practice of connecting your facebook page with your business twitter account. this is a good idea for many reason but possibly none so obvious as the fact that this give you the power to post on your business facebook and twitter will pick it up automatically so you get a facebook and a twitter update with only one post.  easy enough .

For detailed instruction on how to connect your accounts all you need to do is be signed into your facebook and twitter account simultaneously on the same computer , On your facebook account  go to the help center and type twitter in the results will be an entry about connecting the accounts and when you click on it, it will take you through all the steps like one by one you need only read and click ok and allow as it asks .

from here you search for apps on facebook  (NOTE: you have to install apps from your personal account so when you find apps you like and want to install it will take you from your facebook business page to your personal page, the one you have attached to the business page, so don't be alarmed. Look around and find an app that will make you a Twitter tab for your facebook  page this will allow your tweets to feed to facebook page so now you have things going in both directions. I know this sounds redundant but here is what this does for you.



1. You can now make a single post on either facebook or twitter and have that same post it both sites so you are right off the bat are reducing your social media effort substantially

2. You can now easily direct your follower or fans from one site to the other thus getting your likes and followers together so now when you have a new like you very likely get a new follower and in turn a new follower a new like.

3. if you utilize the twitter widget which we discussed in an earlier blog  located here or used the facebook like feed  then you can have it all feed to your site as well . so now you have one post that updates 3 locations keeping everyone engaged and keeping fresh information flowing to all your pages with minimal effort.

In the next installment part II we will talk about how to create customized Facebook pages like mine

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Web-Studio-914/182232718483067?sk=app_161128210587174

and we'll talk about twitter hash tags and what they mean.

Check us out  online

Twitter  | facebook | Our Website | and of course right here on our blog

for more info.

simple way to add some dynamic social media functionality to your website.

Twitter feed
Here is a simple way to add some dynamic social media functionality to your website.
This is what you need to accomplish this.
1. A website that you can enter code into so you can use a regular hand coded site or most CMS site systems like joomla and things like that
2. A Twitter account
What you do is log into your twitter account like normal and then open a new browser window and go to the following url
http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets
Making sure you log in fist make it so you won't have to enter your profile information the tool will automatically pick up who you are.

the first thing you want to do is select website from the left column doing so will populate the middle with different options .
After doing so select the option profile widget from here you can go through several different customization options to change the colors and size of the feed to fit your websites colors and available space.
Once your done tweaking the widget you hit the get code button and copy the code and past it into your site. what this produces for you is a fee that show all your tweets on your site so now you have a fully dynamic window on your site and every time you make a tweet it will post on both twitter and your website and everyone that sees your twitter account or website will be able to find the other more easily. it will keep info on your site fresh with less effort .
Stay Tuned for more

CSS3 Is Amazing

I'm going to Share some awesome code with you that I just discovered. I have been working on a project that required I use html 5 and Css3 and I have to say I'm very impressed at how many cool things Css3 is capable of.
Here is the first bit of code I used
1. body {
2. background: #000 url(bg.jpg)
3. center center fixed no-repeat;
4. -moz-background-size: 100% 100%;
5. background-size: 100% 100%;
6. }

7. @media only all and (max-width: 1024px) and (max-height: 768px)
8. {

9. body {
10. -moz-background-size: 1280px 1024px;
11. background-size: 1280px 1024px;
12. }
13. }
This is a new feature that is part of Css3 only and only compatible with newer versions of IE Netscape Chrome Safari and Firefox, and it actually has the ability to stretch and shrink your pages background image to any users screen resolution. No longer do you have to size your background image to fit what users screen resolution will most commonly be.
And from a design aspect this will really make a huge difference to the versatility of your web work . much more to come stay tuned

Web Studio 914

Web Design tips and tricks:

Simple ways to enhance your web design abilities

Part one: using transparencies

Here are a few ways to use transparent or see through elements to make your website more dynamic.

The first thing we will talk about is PNG.  This file format is a very dynamic image type that is the default file type of Adobe Fireworks software. Fireworks if you are unfamiliar is an Adobe software that is basically like Photoshop but has built in web tools it doesn’t have all the features of photo shop but it’s very easy software to use and it can definitely take a lot of time out of the web  design process without skimping on the quality of your work.



But back to PNG, one of the cool things about this format that really sticks out is that you can actually set the back ground of your image in fireworks to be transparent.

So let say you want to make a page that is going to fit on someone’s screen no matter what the resolution of their monitor. You can use this technique to create a logo for your page with a transparent back ground, and then create a back ground for the page. You set your back ground image on your html page and then put a table on top of that with borders set to zero and the table centered on the page, then when you place your logo into the table not only will it float seamlessly on the background of your page but because you used the centered table then even if the user resizes the page it will auto adjust to the screen.

You can play around with this technique of course for the best results you want to use a table width of 100% sometimes due to the elements you need to use in your page you may have to choose a specific size for your table but always keep in mind what the standard resolutions are pretty much when it comes to width you want to go with 800px or 1024px to assure you don’t have pages that go off the sides of your viewers monitor. But again if at all possible using the table width of 100% will make it work no matter what.

One more quick tip

<body bgcolor="#000000" style="padding:0px; margin:0px; height:100%; color: #000;">

This bit of code here will allow you to take that cell you made in earlier steps of this tutorial and adhere it to the top of the page, basically it removes the padding between the top of the page and the top of your table its especially helpful when you do something like have a horizontal bar that extends the full length of your page and you have a navigation element that is in the table, when you try to change the background of the page to line up with the content it can be messed up my monitors with different resolutions but if you instead stick the table to the top of the page and line background up with that then you won’t have this problem.

Well I hope this helped out please follow our blog and check us out on facebook and twitter for more tips Follow @WebStudio914

Web Studio 914

Social Media Explosions

Social Media Marketing and online advertising has become huge and there are many mainstays in the social media word right now, but who are the other social media platforms to cover to make sure you have a well rounded social media portfolio, so to speak?

Over the past week I have been researching how this all works and I am very interested in any input from other web surfers out there but the following is a small list of neat things I have found on the subject of social media.

Let’s start with a brief examination of how social media works when it comes to business and spreading the good word about what you do and what you offer.

First of all you use social media platforms because that’s where the people are. Having a presents on the web is important in today’s market and that is absolutely true but as quickly as the evolution of business made things like Google and household word now we have progressed even further into Facebook and the like. And it’s enormous! It use to be that to stick out as a legitimate and well to do business you needed an 800 number or a fax number, do you recall the block buster movie about the maker of the fax machine? Cause I sure don’t but I do remember the movie about the youngest billionaire in America the founder of facebook.

So now anyone with an idea can create a business. And Social media is one of the things that took that to new heights because social media sights get literally hundreds and even thousands of times more viewers per hour than even television ads and unlike television ads social media sites are free to join.

Almost like the universal equalizer. Now a day’s it’s not a big bank roll that can make you a huge marketing success but actual innovation and work, the more clever you are with your social media campaigns the more clients and customers you can do so without extremely expensive ad campaigns .

We are all familiar with the power houses like Facebook and Twitter but what else is out there for us to use?

Let me share with you some of the site’s I found and hopefully some of you can weigh in on your opinions and experiences with any of the following services.

Buzz

Stumble Upon

Digg

FourSquare

I will be explaining much more and showing you how to utilize Social media to make a huge boom in your business’s clientele. Stay Tuned

Web Studio 914
www.webstudio914.com