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Gutenblog: website
February 2017
February 2017
We've been building websites for 17 years. We've met some great professionals who create gorgeous, effective, sensibly-priced websites for small businesses in need. But for every one of them, I've met a lot more who charge too much, know too little, and are more likely than not to suddenly stop answering client calls one day — who prey on those who lack the right industry knowledge to defend themselves.
To level the playing field, I've summed the most important lessons you need to know into this five-point buyer's guide meant to help business owners get a fair deal they can feel confident in.
#1: Understand What You're Buying
A quality website is the product of five types of expertise working together:
- Strategy — Understanding what your business is, what the website needs to do, and how it should fit with your social media and other marketing tools.
- Content — Writing sales copy, sourcing high-res photos, creating graphics and videos, etc.
- Design — Translating your content and ...
March 2015
March 2015
Bulk Website Deployment System
Gutensite has built a really great system to deploy websites in bulk, using Master Sites that are cloned to create starter content for the new website. This is how your new website had default content when you first got started. Now we've made this tool available to our partners.
We've been working with partners who need to provide websites to a network of clients, e.g. Real Estate Brokers that need websites for hundreds of Real Estate Agents, or Churches that need thousands of websites for all the churches in their denomination, or Design Agencies that need websites for all their clients. So we let our partners build one or more Master Sites that represent all the default authorized content for their agents, and then they provide us with a spreadsheet of new sites (or sign people up one by one from their partner page) and the new websites are automatically filled with all their content.
A website with great and useful content can take weeks to ...
April 2014
April 2014
Inc. recently ran an article and infographic about the biggest challenges small businesses have with their websites. We've been saying this stuff for years, so we thought we would share.
The main problems small businesses have with their website include:
- No Clear Call to Action
- Poor Design that Doesn't Impress and Engage
- Difficulty Updating Content
- No Way to Measure Success
- Poor SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Not Optimized for Mobile
- No Designated IT person
Our CMS makes it easy to update your website, our support team helps every step of the way, our sites are Mobile/Responsive on every sized device, and we function as the webmaster and technical team for our small business clients. Furthermore, when we build websites for our clients, we make sure clients figure out what their conversion goals are, so we can help them design a website that funnels traffic to those conversion goals and measure the results. This means every page includes a call to action, e.g. you view ...
September 2013
September 2013
Gutensite has been nominated as the Best Cloud/Hosted CMS at the 2013 CMS Critic's Choice Awards! We were among the top four platforms to receive this recognition and voting has now begun for who will win the final honor.
Please take one minute to cast your final vote before Sept 30, so we can win and gain valuable recognition that will help us grow and make Gutenite better for you! *You can ignore all the other categories.
There are thousands of Content Management Systems on the market that you could use to build your website. So we are very grateful that you chose Gutensite, and we proud that our tiny team, has created something that competes with the biggest companies in the market, e.g. Adobe, Wordpress, Drupal, etc.
We have big plans, and we're working really hard toward building Gutensite 2.0, which we hope will not only continue being an awesome partner to support your organization's creative and business needs, but will also be a really cool CMS that lets you make an ...
March 2013
March 2013
This article is part of a series Comparing CMS Platforms through the Lifecycle of a Website.
A successful website should lead to growth in your business. You can start with a simple site if you are on a budget, and then add features as you learn how to optimize your website for conversions and integrate your website into important business processes that save you money and improve customer satisfaction.
Flexible, Customizable and Scalable
Once you reach this point, you have already exceeded the limitations of Squarespace, Wix and Weebly. These platforms are not flexible and do not allow any customization of functionality. They will not grow with you. Wordpress is an open source platform that is flexible enough that you can hire third party developers to help you extend the CMS to meet your needs, but at its core it is still a blogging platform and you’ll need to hire and manage a team of contractors (hopefully they come well recommended).
Gutensite is designed from the ground ...
March 2013
March 2013
Building a paper airplane is cheap, easy and fun! But it won’t fly you to your destination. When choosing which platform is best for your website, sometimes what seems like the easiest option ends up being just a waste of time.
There are three phases in every website’s life. Unfortunately when most people choose which website platform is best for their project, they only think about the first “Build” phase. As a result, CMS platforms that have instant visual appeal usually get a lot of attention and praise. But when the sugar rush wears off, sometimes you realize that the platform doesn’t work well for the long run.
Before you commit to a website platform, measure how it will perform for the full cycle of it’s life:
- Build. A great website must first be planned so that it brings you the most value, it must be designed to look professional and optimize conversions, and it must be built to support your functionality requirements.
- Manage. A website needs new content that is SEO ...
November 2012
November 2012
Have you ever been seduced by a beautiful gallery and a smooth interface promising you a quick and easy way to make a free website? Only to sign up and waste hours before you realize it's a lot harder than it looks, the promised functionality is lacking and you aren't a talented enough designer to keep your site from looking like a stinking pile of discarded Excel files?
Here are the top five problems you'll encounter with cheap website services.
- Advertise our Hot Widget Sauce. If you blog about widgets, you'll start seeing ads for your competitors widgets appearing directly on your site.
- Combo Meal #3 Please. The functionality is very limited, and there's no ordering off the menu. If your business needs things to work a special way... "go fish."
- Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky. You will have a website... just like millions of other businesses. And they'll all look just the same. You want to have a custom design, that supports your brand? Don't be silly.
- I've Fallen and I ...
October 2012
October 2012
Gutensite was nominated as one of the Best Website Builders in the industry by CMS Critic and their followers. Voting has now closed but if you haven't tried Gutensite create a site with our free 14 day Pro trial, take advantage of our free support, and see why people love us.
November 2010
November 2010
Check out our New Promo that runs through November 14th (early birds have better chance of winning so hurry). We're giving away one Free Pro Webmaster Package website for a year (after that if you like it you can keep it and become a regular customer). This has a $420 value, and there will be a winner in every city!
February 2010
February 2010
We are proud to announce the launch of a new flagship Gutensite website for Alain Pinel, a local Luxury Real Estate Broker with about 1300 agents in the San Francisco Bay Area. We created the first Bay Area Open House Search website, which has integrated live property data from the four independent Multiple Listing Services in the area. This in itself was a Herculean feat, since they all follow separate data standards, so we had to create a shared standard of our own. The new seamlessly integrates this data, and provides additional features such as: map based searches, property mapping, street view, directions, favorites, RSS subscription, email alerts, and open house route planning for multiple properties.
Alain Pinel has created this site as a way to save them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by weaning themselves off weekly print advertising for open house announcements which costs them a fortune. This website can not only save them tremendous amounts of money, but it also ...
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