By Allan Maurer

“People are beginning to figure out that Web sites are very complicated things that need to be maintained and upgraded regularly,” says Jeffrey Hoffman president, CEO, and founder of WebslingerZ, a North Carolina-based Web development firm established in 1995.

Since people generally do not have the ability to do Web engineering on a developer level, they’re looking for ways to do updates and maintenance themselves rather than pay others to do it on an hourly basis. So, even “People you wouldn’t expect to say the words “content management system” are asking for them,” says Hoffman.

“They may be marketing, sales, PR folks who have things they want to accomplish via the Web: updating photos and text or more complicated things like using content management systems as sales or marketing applications,” Hoffman says. “They want to do their entire workflow on the Web and use it as a lead generation service.”

That means, he notes, they need a content management system that lets them build a form to intake leads and manage them.

Underlying programming necessary

“So you need tools to manage them and assign them to sales people and to keep track of them,” says Hoffman.

That means some sort of underlying programming architecture is necessary. There, two schools exist. One, the commercial packages offered by Microsoft or IBM, or two, an open source package. Several popular open source packages are available, says Hoffman. “The beauty of open source, which we prefer,” he says, “is that the code is open. If you want to revise the way the CMS functions, you can extend it.”

WebslingerZ prefers to use an open source framework even on a custom build, he adds. Why would clients pay for open source based systems when the code is generally available free or at low cost?

They may be free, but they are not necessarily what the average user is comfortable using without help.

“That’s one of the core businesses these days, deploying these types of systems,” says Hoffman. For content management and blogging, he says, “We might use WordPress,” he says.

Corporate blogging on the rise

Corporate blogging is another hot area in Web development, says Hoffman. “It’s something people are asking for, although they’re not always sure what they’re asking for. Hoffman points out that what is a simple decision for an individual: to blog or not to blog, becomes more complex for a corporation. Are the blogs in question external or internal? The question may raise security concerns.

Of the corporate approaches to blogging, Hoffman says the way to take advantage of what the form offers is to have company experts blog about specific things that will draw in readers who will comment, rather than one expert pontificating weekly.

He suggests a variety of other creative corporate blogging strategies. “To bring in customers,” he says, “use the blog as an external framework to get product care and support information to customers.”

Internally, he notes, companies may want to look at blogging for employees for an exchange of information and ideas.

In house YouTubes?

Hoffman says WebslingerZ is also seeing a demand for corporate versions of You Tube. “We’re getting requests for organizations that want their own version of You Tube,” he says. Customers may not have given a lot of thought to what they want to do with it, but Web developers get requests for popular Internet services, he says.

Felix Figuereo, managing director of Savannah, SC-based Nicasio Design and Development, also sees CMS as a hot area. The company specializes in WordPress. “That’s what’s really hot right now,” he says. “Customers are not really wanting to pay a Web guy to change pictures or make updates. It’s surprising to me how many customers call them content management systems.”

That’s different from all the years when all the changes came though the Web Master/Gatekeeper, says Figuereo. “Now customers are specifically asking for WordPress,” he says.

An average Web site that once cost $8,000 or more now costs about $3,000 or $4,000,” he with WordPress, he says.

While WordPress is free, “Our customers are not very technical,” says Figuereo. “You have to be able to troubleshoot it and make it work the way you want. There are templates, but they may present updating problems, he notes.

“We build custom themes around the WordPress engine, not templates. A customer walks away not only with a very dynamic site, but with one of the most powerful content management systems.”

Figuereo says one area where he sees potential growth for Web developers in Web 2.0 technologies. “The life cycle of a Web site is three to five years. More and more sites are in need of redesign and Web 2.0 is what corporate businesses are throwing at us. We don’t get it so much from individuals or small businesses.”

For larger firms with Web sites, he says, “It’s about staying relevant to their customers.” That presents an opportunity to sell Enterprise level WordPress systems, he says. The three-person company also does custom programming for its 80 or so customers.

WebslingerZ Hoffman says that more and more, the Web is something organizations are using more and more. “I don’t’ think the modern business environment could survive without this. Years ago you had to convince people the Web wasn’t going away. Now it’s taken for granted.”

© 2008, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.