Build website and CMS

[BAL1974]

hi,

Which company provide CMS and website software, which an amateur like me can make his own webpages?


Is has to be af CMS provider, who offer CMS to small business and to private as-well.
Can you help me to get an onverview regarding the CMS market in Australia - but a provider with a low start costs :-)

Hope to hear from you.

[Brendan]

Hey BAL.. I have recommended a few people here - Design Your Own Business Website! Quality website design packages made easy - (http://www.yourbusinesswebsite.com.au)

It is a fantastic tool, you should give the free trial a go.. best thing is it is hosted in australia so is really fast and support is great .. but maybe I am biased :P

You may also want to look at a self hosted solution like wordpress or joomla.

[BAL1974]

Great - how is the competition for cheap CMS in Australia? Is there many Australia CMS companies?

[scoletts]

I wholeheartedly recommend CMS Made Simple CMS Made Simple - Open Source Content Management System (http://www.cmsms.org)

It requires a little design and development knowledge but holds its weight against the giant, drupal, and it's "taxonomy" is a whole heap less confusing.

[gigglemedia]

WordPress is a good CMS. While it was originally designed for blogging, the growing range of plugins make it a pretty powerful CMS that is user friendly. I've used Joomla in the past and have found that WordPress meets my client needs just as well. Depends on your needs. WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform (http://wordpress.org)

Wix is one that's popped up recently. I vehemently hate Flash but if you like, it may suit your needs. Create a Free Website , Free Flash Website Builder at Wix.com (http://www.wix.com/)

If you're a good designer and coder, Surreal CMS is a fantastic platform to create and maintain simple websites with a faux CMS. Surreal CMS (http://surrealcms.com/)

All of the above can be used for free and then upgraded to paid accounts.

[BAL1974]

Great! Is all the above CMS have great SEO functionality ?

[HWT]

Drupal isn't the best for SEO I've found.

We run a little computer store and can help customise the most popular CMSs to suit what you need. Usually takes a couple of days to set it up 'exactly' right unless you're doing something extremely simple.

[ray_223]

Drupal isn't the best for SEO I've found.

We run a little computer store and can help customise the most popular CMSs to suit what you need. Usually takes a couple of days to set it up 'exactly' right unless you're doing something extremely simple.

I find Drupal (with a couple of addon modules) to be great for SEO.

What problems do you face?

Regards,

Ray Smith
RaymondSmith.com | simple by design (http://RaymondSmith.com)

[firstmillion]

I will be interested in setting up a website. Where do you suggest to host the website?

Cheers

[HWT]

I find Drupal (with a couple of addon modules) to be great for SEO.

What problems do you face?
Probably the lack of addon modules :)

It doesn't set meta description and keywords by default, you need to add them in manually in the theme. And then you're stuck with the same ones across the entire site unless you do some hacking to make different sections display different information. Not an issue with a small homogenous site but when you have a big site with a lot of different stuff it makes a difference. I had a jump in ranking when I manually added these things.

Also has h1 for the logo and h2 for content headers. Not sure how much this affects things though.

My site with extremely poor ranking is a drupal one. My site with good ranking is also drupal. The poorly ranked site is *much* better quality content and layout-wise. I suppose I just need to wait for something to change in Google-land.

[ray_223]

Probably the lack of addon modules :)


Try:
Nodewords | drupal.org (http://drupal.org/project/nodewords) - The poorly named "Meta Tags" module - can have global and per page meta tags

XML sitemap | drupal.org (http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap) - to create xml sitemaps - great for SEO

Google Analytics | drupal.org (http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics) - for Google Analytics

And obviously the built in path module.

This I reckon will give you access to 95% of the "tools" you'll need to achieve a high ranking - the rest is up to you!

[HWT]

Its always about the modules, isn't it *eyeroll*

Cheers for that. Should help a lot.

[ChromatixIrwin]

Wordpress has the best SEO due to the way its built. With CMS's like Joomla, you can get SEO modules that help you, but do remember, the SEO game is more than just the base system, its everything from content, linking, how things are laid out....it's a job in itself.

Cheers
Irwin
__________________
Irwin Hau | Chromatix
Boutique Web Design and Graphic Arts studio
www.chromatix.com.au (http://www.chromatix.com.au/)

[ray_223]

Wordpress has the best SEO due to the way its built.
[snip]


Hi,

Apart from having a few simple things built in - how do you see it being better?

[silkinteriors]

I've used http://www.websitegurus.com.au for my website. It's about $1k for them to design and set it up plus $77 per month hosting. It's fine for what I'm doing at the moment and I've worked with their CMS in the past - it's easy enough to use though somewhat quirky. It's also not very flexible - you can't just add modules on. You get what you're given and there's zero customisation. Hopefully we'll be in a position in a year from now where we can develop our own custom site from scratch, but for a start up, it's not a bad way to go.

[ray_223]

I've used http://www.websitegurus.com.au for my website. It's about $1k for them to design and set it up plus $77 per month hosting.

$77/month seems a little steep for hosting - unless it includes a significantly featured ecommerce system with great support.
I'd be interested if this was an average price small businesses paid for that kind of service??

[silkinteriors]

$77/month seems a little steep for hosting - unless it includes a significantly featured ecommerce system with great support.
I'd be interested if this was an average price small businesses paid for that kind of service??

Yes, it's a full ecommerce site, has a CMS, has a client management database for targeted newsletters, articles etc. I had a great response so far with the one support request I had. If I got someone to design and build this site from scratch for me it would cost me a lot more than the $2k it will cost us to build and host in the first year.

They definitely make their money on the hosting side of things.

It's not for everyone, has it's limitations, that's for sure, but I think it's a good solution for us at this early stage of our business.

[silkinteriors]

I'd be interested if this was an average price small businesses paid for that kind of service??

I'd be interested to know what other small businesses pay for their websites too.

[JamesGG]

I'd be interested to know what other small businesses pay for their websites too.

Our was done by barter, a job-swap. Likewise for the blog that we now have (with the same person). Approx value of what we contributed to the deal was about $2k; in return, we got the design, cms and full setup. Annually, I think we're paying something like $420 including hosting and the domain.

I don't know what the market value is for what we have, but to me, it represents good value and we would've agreed to pay more if it was requested. I love what she's done for us.

[HWT]

Our business site is a 'brochure' style one - a few paragraphs of text and contact information, nothing else. Took an afternoon to set up, pro-rata for traffic given it is on a shared hosting account it costs a dollar or so a year to host.

We've changed advertising tactics this year - we're going to be paying considerably more for local print advertising than bothering with the internet. For us, it gets a better response.

[SydneyWebService]

I normally build websites with Joomla CMS, as I found that it is easy for the developer to tweak and for the end user to use.

[justinsigns]

We pay $300 per year for 1.5gb space and 10gb data hosted in Australia, its a reseller account and suits us being able to manage all 3 sites with ease, plus SSL and domains.

Our ecommerce site is CubeCart 4 with mods.

[dnicholls]

As mentioned in my most recent post. I would suggest web123.com.au, they seem to offer more than just a great CMS, stats, information, price competitiveness etc etc etc. If you mention 3NZ7VT you get discounts too - a promotional code the owner gave me!

link - Build your own Website - Easy As! DIY Website with our Step-by-Step Website Builder and Save. (http://www.web123.com.au) - hope this helps!