And save money doing it
By Ian Harvey

In the beginning there was the Webmaster. And the Webmaster said, "Let there be a domain for this business," and there was. And then the Webmaster said, "If you need to make any more changes, I bill by the hour and I don’t work nights or weekends."
    "We were paying up to $3,000 a month," said Kevin Kirk Layton, president and founder of Eservus, an online corporate concierge service providing event tickets and value-added services to office-building tenants in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. "And we paid more if we needed updates."
    Layton realized he needed to take control of the Web site, which represents about 75 per cent of the company’s revenues. "I wanted just a shell that we could add our content to." He found SnapTech, a Burnaby, B.C.-based company that provides Web hosting and content management systems for small- to mid-sized businesses. In the year since, the change has been "night and day," Layton said. 
    "This is really as easy as cut and paste," said Tim Groeneveld, SnapTech’s sales director. The company uses a software-as-service model in which clients pay an average set-up fee of around $800 and then $250/month for hosting, domain, training, support and continuing software upgrades. 
    Web sites can be updated from anywhere using a simple browser-based interface which has Microsoft Word-type buttons allowing users to highlight and click to change fonts or sizes. Pictures or graphics can similarly be added to pages and updates can be scheduled to run and stop on specific dates, creating a fresh, dynamic look. Many of these applications also have plug-in modules to track essential Web metrics such as referring links and search engines, as well as an integrated e-mail marketing package.
    "The trend we’re seeing in the one-to-25 employee space is toward software as a service," said Stuart Crawford, director of business development at IT Matters in Calgary, which advises small businesses on technology issues. "It really takes the risk out for small business and it’s affordable."
    Content management systems (CMS) are nothing new, though they’ve become far more affordable and user friendly in the last five years. Originally developed for large enterprises, current versions run the gamut from multilingual, segmentable e-retail platforms for large online sellers costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to free, open-source applications.
    These systems treat content, text or images as assets referenced via a database. Moving content around merely requires a set of instructions linking an asset to a specified place on a target page. 
    "The days of putting up static sites are gone," said Rick Patri, vice-president of sales and co-founder of Marqui, a content management solution and Web design company in Vancouver. It also operates on a software-as-service basis. "The ’net has made it easy to do comparison shopping and people want to see new and fresh content. [Fresh content] is not a nice-to-have anymore, it’s a must-have."
    Kevin Hollis, vice-president of BAASS, an accounting practice spread across Toronto, Burlington and London, knows the wearisome dance of the Webmaster all too well.
    "It was so frustrating that our Web site really wasn’t updated for two years," he said of the decision to go with SnapTech’s CMS. "We now get the software for what we used to pay for hosting alone. 
    "And it only takes about a half day a month to keep the site updated."
    The company built an employees-only section of the site where policies and procedures are posted, and this is evolving into a full-blown intranet with human resources functions as well, he said, a critical factor for a business in which teams collaborate from three separate locations.

1st on the List www.1stonthelist.ca
Marqui www.marqui.com
SnapTech www.snaptech.ca