Content Management System

What is a Content Management System?

A content management system (or CMS) is a tool that allows an organization to make changes to its website without having to work with HTML code.

Paying a web designer to update your website will no longer cut it.

In the 1990s, many web designers built their business model around designing websites for an organization, and then charging the organization a fee every time the website needed an update.  However, this is just not acceptable today.  Your customers expect your website to be constantly up-to-date.  If it's not, they will be much less likely to do business with you. 

The 1990s website approach is a waste of your time and money. In the time it takes you to email your web designer to request a change, you could have made the change yourself using a CMS.  Most web designers who used this outdated business model are now impossible to contact, because they have dozens of clients tying up their phone lines asking for changes, and they simply can't keep up.

If you use a CMS from another web design firm, you may have horror stories too.

Many web designers now depend on free, open-source CMS systems like Joomla, and install these systems on the websites of the organizations they serve. While we love the concept of open source programming, there are several problems with most of these open-source CMS systems. 

The first problem is that the systems are often complicated to learn.  The systems are buried in switches and dials that you don't really need, while ironically missing out on some obvious basics that could really help your business grow. Second, because the open source systems are being modified regularly by thousands of developers around the world, there is not a single, unified vision for how these systems should work -- nor is there a specific end-user in mind.

Most importantly, many web designers who install open source systems like Joomla or WordPress on their customers' websites are unable to develop custom features to your specifications.  They didn't develop the system up-front, so adding specific features that you request might very well be out of the question.

SpireCMS is a fresh, original approach to content management.

SpireCMS is different. 

It's so simple to use, that at first glance you might mistakenly think it is light weight.  But once you start using it, you'll realize that it actually has MORE features than the most popular systems like Joomla and WordPress, while being a lot easier to use.

Here's what makes SpireCMS different...

• The ultimate blend of power & simplicity.  You'll have complete control over every bit of content on your website.  With a powerful WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get), you'll be able to post professional looking pages, blogs, photo albums, video, podcasts, flash slideshows, calendars, news releases, surveys and more that expand your imagination for what's possible on your website.  Despite all the power & control you'll have, you'll marvel at how simple it is to use.
  
  
• Easy to learn, & fully supported by our team. More than 50% of the small business owners who use SpireCMS would NOT consider themselves computer-savvy.  Yet in less than 90 minutes, we are able to train any English-speaking person to use SpireCMS -- even those folks who are uncomfortable learning things on a computer.  
  
  The reason its so simple is due to its consistent design. Because the CMS was built by a small team with a unified vision for how it should work, every part of SpireCMS follows the same conventions.  Bottom line, if you know how to use one single part of SpireCMS, you'll know how to use all of it.  (Schedule a demo to see what we mean.)   Whenever you need support, our team is available to help answer your questions at no charge.

• Get more traffic with content that ranks well in Google.  What good is a website if people can't find you when they search for you in top search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN?   We invest thousands of dollars each year keeping up with the latest search engine optimization (SEO) trends, and then we pack all of these principles into the core of your CMS. 
  
  Best of all, you don't have to think about it.  Simply add some new content to your website with the simple interface.  Without you having to do a thing, SpireCMS will automatically write RSS feeds, update XML sitemaps, ping the search engines to tell them you added new content and update your pages with permalinks, meta tags, tag clouds and more.  
  
  Don't know what that stuff means?  You don't have to worry about it, because SpireCMS has it covered.  Just focus on regularly adding new content... you'll be amazed at how quickly your traffic will grow.
  
  
• Fully scalable & customizable to your exact specifications.   Your organization is not identical to other organizations, which means your needs are unique too.  Because we built SpireCMS in-house, the original developers are standing by to build custom features to your exact specifications.  Just tell us what you need it to do, and we can develop new panels, or customize existing panels however they are needed.   Anything that we create for you now or in the future will follow the same conventions as the rest of the site, making it easy to learn and fully integrated with the website as a whole.  

Where did SpireCMS come from?

SpireCMS was developed by our in-house team of marketing pros, developers, designers -- and with a lot of feedback from our customers.  The original content management system we offered our clients was called Solidmark CMS.  It was developed by Jason Chase, a long-time friend and business peer of Spire owner Jeremy Harrison.  The original CMS was used for over 6 years by hundreds of small business leaders across the country, and the team at Spire continued to make improvements to Solidmark CMS based on user feedback.  In July 2008, our team built a new CMS with new SEO features and an improved user interface.  We call it SpireCMS. However, it's no secret that some of the core functions of SpireCMS were based on the groundwork layed by Jason Chase with Solidmark. When Jeremy shared the new system with his friend in Philadelphia, he liked it so much that he started offering it to his clients too! 

In Fall 2010, Jason officially joined forces with the Spire team.  He now leads the charge with some of our most innovative custom web development projects.