Let’s face it – Web Design and User Interaction is only the beginning of your journey. If you are talking to a design firm and the web hosting and CMS discussion goes something like, “We will support whatever decision you make ” – you need to stop right there. This is a symptom of a blind spot, and one that cannot endure in the Web Design space much longer. All designers need to have a great story around hosting and support if they intend to compete. Why? Because the design space is hugely crowded in a declining economy and clients will now look for a complete package, at a fraction of the current cost. Clients do not want to PM their creative projects and coordinate different vendors, they want a complete solution. Managed CMS is the answer. It has to be on shrinking creative and design budgets.
“Social Networking” is simply a buzzword for the reality of today’s internet experience, and Drupal has emerged as the clear leader. The Drupal Community baked in social networking from day one, it will take other CMS years to bolt on functionality that is already in Drupal and already mature and optimized.
Internet community enabled sites need to be able to handle all kinds of traffic, they need to scale, they need to support new web technology easily and they need to be updated constantly, this means the CMS requires backend management, from qualified IT professionals. We all know that simply launching a site is not enought these days, the site needs content updates, and the client wants to do this without another design engagement. The client needs a partner, not just a designer.
“Web Hosting” is not a decision to be made lightly. Putting your website on a server that has hundreds of other sites and dozens of other applications running is really asking for trouble. Putting your website on a server that only gets attention when your site goes down, just does not cut it in 2008.
In the coming weeks, Zemelo will make a series of announcements around Drupal and around a strategy to provide best in class hosting to our clients as part of our engagement process. We’ve come from the IT space, and we know how to provide our customers with rock solid IT related services. When Carbon ships, we will be one of the first companies to support this in a hosted environment, almost immediately.
Web 2.0 is not just about design – it’s about what happens when your community grows. Is your designer talking to you about everything? Do you know everything you need to know about launching your Web 2.0 site? Is your CMS fully supported? Stay Tuned.