Your Institution’s Most Valuable Asset

May 30th, 2008

In my final post as May guest blogger, I wanted to say “thanks” to all of you who work so hard on your websites, especially the web content managers. In an earlier post I said that your website is your institution’s most valuable asset. Well, I’d like to correct that and say that I believe it’s actually you who should be considered your institution’s most valuable asset. Why? Well, consider this…

According to the most recent statistic I can find on Google and Netcraft, there are approximately 43 billion web pages on the World Wide Web today. Those pages are served by about 158 million unique websites. That’s an average of about 272 web pages per website. Now, according to Google, there are about 758 million web pages representing approximately 5,000 higher educational websites (.edu sites). That’s an astonishing 152,000 web pages, on average, per college site, or approximately 56,000% more pages than the average site on the World Wide Web.

Using these facts and figures, and excluding only the largest e-commerce and media related websites, it’s clear that there are no harder working individuals on the planet than you!

Given the extraordinary effort you and your team make on a daily basis, I have yet to find a single one of you that wants to complicate their job further with burdensome technology. My work revolves around your web content management software (CMS) needs, and over the years I’ve seen a lot of web CMS technologies make a lot of promises. The biggest failing of most of these technologies is that they often make managing content more challenging than before — not something you need!

So, our goal at OmniUpdate has been to keep our web CMS extremely easy to use; yet powerful as a technical engine.  We designed it in 2001 exclusively for higher education; consequently, we understand how different your problems are from business and e-commerce sites. Our design ensures WYSIWYG ease of use for everyone involved, plus complete separation of content from design, version control and roll-back, content repurposing, and all the specs even the most hardened techie would love.

Why is this CMS approach important? Consider the fact that:

1. IT staff benefit from a standards based approach to web CMS. XML and XSL are the backbone of Web 2.0 and at the very core of OmniUpdate’s templating system.
2. Administrators benefit from the ability to control permissions and manage actions at a department and/or individual level — it’s a powerful capability (and very important) to decide and implement “who can do what” on your website.
3. Recruiting, admissions, public relations and marketing staff benefit from all the communication and messaging features previously described earlier in this series: blogs, RSS, video, online chat, etc. (Yes, one CMS can do all that!)
4. Decision-making committees appreciate a user-based pricing model that is scalable with flexible terms, and would like to purchase one product that delivers all the previously described benefits and functionalities.

OmniUpdate is used today by website heroes just like you to update the content on over 450 college and university websites.  And there’s no doubt in my mind that YOU are your institution’s most valuable asset.

I look forward to meeting you at the eduWeb Conference in July.

Lance Merker
May Guest Blogger

CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com

Entry Filed under: eduWeb Conference, Marketing, Web Development, Web 2.0, Channels, Branding, Mobile Apps, Mobile Web, Video, Open Web Apps, New Media, Web Apps, Content, Online Communications