Web 2.0Web 2.0 - Why You Need to Know About It!
Web 2.0 site Before I begin, let me take a moment to introduce myself. My name is John Palmer, and I have been a web developer and designer for 15 years. My experience with web building goes back to just a few months after the introduction of Mosaic 1.0. Ever heard of that one? Maybe not. It was a little college project that got released into Open Source on the Internet as a way to view and link documents together. The author called it a "browser".
We thought it might be a cool way to setup a little document library for our company, AirTouch Cellular. Talk about missing the potential!!! Six months later that program was taking over the Internet and putting companies like CompuServe and Prodigy out of business. Oh, the guy who did Mosaic as a project along with his money buddy founded a company based on that document browser. They called it Netscape.
Anyway, let me get to the point. In all my time of building web sites, and I have built hundreds of them, I have always struggled with the tools. I admit it. I hate DreamWeaver! Although I do agree it's the best html tool out there, I've always felt like the whole premise was a stupid way to build websites. It's like building a car from nuts and bolts every single time. What kind of sense does that make?
In 2004, right as Empro moved to Las Vegas, I was introduced to the concept of using a database driven CMS (content manager) to build websites. Although content managers where not new to me, they had always been reserved for high end clients, due to the costs of implementation and training. But this was something different. This was Open Source software, it was free, and it was really really good.
At first it seemed odd to have all that software running a small website. I spent most of the first installations shutting off most of the features. But then I began to realize what it was actually doing with all that code. It was doing all the background work for me. It was outputting really clean code that automatically worked well in every browser. It was compliant in every way, even in ways I typically overlooked. And, it had features that nearly all my customers wanted, even if they didn't know they wanted them.
For the first time in our history creating websites we were able to give all our customers, even those with the simplest requests, excellent sites with extensive features that performed perfectly for every visiting browser and search engine alike. All of the sites we build using this system are optimized for every likely scenario. Browsers, search engine robots, and most importantly, Spam bots are all detected and adjusted for appropriately.
Over the first few months of working with CMS driven sites, we began to realize that building sites the old way was not only clunky, it was downright wrong. We simply could not ignore the advantages that the CMS created for our customers, even on sites with only a few pages. So in January 2005 we stopped all html production and moved completely to the CMS platform, building only Web 2.0 compliant systems, faster, cheaper, and better than ever before.
Now our customers invest in content instead of construction and design rather than implementation. We can concentrate on message and optimization instead of cranking out yet another static html page. Gone are the days of endless testing. These days we know our pages work, everywhere! We hear no complaints from our customers about any of their visitors having trouble with their sites. This, quite frankly, is unprecedented.
There is quite a bit more to say about it, but the impact simply cannot really be shared online without making it very long and overly technical read. Suffice to say, if you have not switched to a Web 2.0, eventually you will. And if you wait, when you finally do make the switch, you'll realize that waiting was the wrong thing to do. Your competitors will be ahead of you and your visitors will have left for their sites long ago.
Web 2.0 is happening. It could be happening for you. Call us today and tell us what you want to do on the Internet. We'll tell you how easy it is using Web 2.0 technology, and soon your website will be the one everyone is trying to keep up with.
