Content management systems are a huge part of both my business and my everyday life. The term has almost become ubiquitous online for any piece of software that lets you manage information to be presented in another form or fashion to end-users. Thanks to the increasing need for multi-user systems for managing all of the information available inside corporations and other groups the need for quality content management is rising exponentially with each passing month. If you’re looking to publish online or in print and have tons of information to manage a CMS is the only way to go in order to get your project in motion.
In my own business, building a custom content management system is definitely not a rare request but I also offer other services so I’m not always in a position to fill that need. There are companies, such as DPCI, that specialize in building and selling digital asset management software.
By going with CMS experts, like DPCI, you can be assured you’ll get the system and assistance you need. There are so many content management options on the market today that it’s important to find a vendor or consultant that knows how to separate the good from the bad and get you a working system that will help your business or project succeed.
In my years of freelancing, I’ve come across the need on several occasions to find a viable provider of Exchange hosting. A lot of businesses want the benefits of an Exchange system but are afraid of the inherent costs of the hardware and IT maintenance.
An alternative to an in-house Exchange server is a hosted solution. SherWeb is one of the providers I find meets the needs of most companies looking for Exchange hosting. At just under $9 per mailbox the plans are affordable and come with no minimum number of users. That’s a big plus for smaller sized businesses looking for the benefits of an Exchange Server without the normally high costs associated with one.
SherWeb also provides hosted Sharepoint for those businesses looking to take advantage of Microsoft’s popular collaboration environment. The Sharepoint web hosting that SherWeb provides its customers comes with built-in integration for Microsoft Office and their hosted Exchange service. With an online collaboration environment it’s easier to keep offices in proper communication on their projects.
SherWeb offers a complete set of hosted business tools and applications and better than competitive pricing. I highly suggest businesses of any size, or freelancers looking to make recommendations to their clients, give SherWood’s product line a good, hard look.
I do a lot of my freelance work in an industry where time is usually of the essence. This makes for incredibly tight deadlines but also creates a lot of leeway on issues of billing. If you want something don’t quickly, but correctly, sometimes you just need to pay for it. When a client and I are working against the clock on a site it’s not uncommon for us to outsource the work of converting a design into markup for us.
That’s where services like the ones provided by Choppr come into play. They offer table-less html/css development at a very reasonable rate. For only $200, they will take your design in the form of any standard image file and in three days convert it into standards compliant, hand coded HTML & CSS markup with optimized images and cross-browser compatibility. The quality of their code (which is incredibly important to someone like me who needs to wrap PHP around it) can be seen on their site.
A nice part of the service Choppr provides is their willingness to convert a psd/png/ai layout to html. That gives your on-staff designer a lot of options and the opportunity to work in their graphic design program of choice. This again lends a helping end to web developers on strict timelines.
The idea of outsourcing markup work like this might be something new to a lot of you. I think it’s something you should strongly consider especially if converting layouts into markup is just not something you enjoy. It’s also a fantastic option for those of us who might be incredibly strong at programming but fail a bit when it comes to design. You could save a huge amount of time and stress by even outsourcing the design first and then hiring Choppr to take that layout and convert it for you.
As my freelance career has progressed I’ve had some experience with outsourcing these kinds of projects. A lot of layout converting companies promise you the world for pennies and end up delivering terrible markup that doesn’t run in a variety of browsers and ends up costing you more time and money to fix than you would’ve spent just doing it yourself.
If you’re looking for a quality group to code up a layout for you check out Choppr. They believe in web standards and clean code for a fair price and that’s pretty rare these days.
