Benefits of the beaconbee CMS

beaconbee CMS checklist

Put simply, our aim is to be the absolute best provider of cost effective, feature rich and easy to use business websites in the world. We spent years developing the technologies to spare you having to be a web developer or designer to have an effective, efficient website. Freeing you to what you do best, your business.

We recognise it is sometimes hard to compare providers, so we prepared a simple checklist to help you evaluate the different options

Are all content management systems the same?

Not all content management systems are the same. The easiest way to evaluate one of them is to check their features against this checklist. Often, when a provider does not offer a feature they will try to argue you do not in fact need it, and that may be indeed the case, so think about your needs right now and over the next few years in determining which of these features are really useful to you.

Immediate & Scheduled Publication

With this feature you can either send your changes live immediately or you can specify the date and time you want these changes to be published. This is particularly useful in situations where for legal reasons information timing must be precisely controlled.

For example if you want a press release to be available at say 5 PM on the following day, not before or after and saves you having to sit there looking at your watch waiting for the right moment to publish the changes.

Full preview

This is an essential feature which allows you to see exactly what the page will look like with your changes BEFORE you publish those changes. This allows you to go back and make any adjustments necessary to get it just right before you proceed with publishing.

You never know when the search engines are looking at your website to index and you do not want the only impression they see if that of a broken page you are editing at the time.

Structured content layout

For content like news, press releases, events, photo galleries to name a few you want to focus on uploading your text and images with the confidence that the layout will be just right. Compare this to the case where every page is a blank canvas and you have to basically learn to be a web designer to get your text, images and file links to line up.

Comprehensive media library

To safe keep and organise your images and files and add them to any page on the website. Of course you can use one application to upload the files, then go looking for them and figure out how to include them in the text you're typing all yourself.

Or you can use a secure, integrated and powerful media library to make your life easy and your work efficient.

Included bandwidth

You will see some providers with very large bandwidth allowances included in sometimes quite cheap packages. So here are some questions to make sure that much bandwidth is truly available, try to get the answer to these questions in writing (or via email) if you can.

Is there a limit to the number of connections to the server or site?
Is there a limit to the network throughput to the server or site?
Does the bandwidth figure provided reflect the maximum bandwidth physically possible to download from the server or site?

The reason behind those questions is that some providers will physically limit pipeline connected to your site and then say you can have as much through as you can. Think of it as an all you can drink bar but you can only drink using a very narrow straw so no matter how hard you try you can never drink much at all.

"Carbon Neutral" websites

The way we went about creating our Carbon Neutral packages involved several steps:

First we audited the amount of energy used by our servers to power and cool them using the Dell Server Footprint estimates.
Then we apportioned this cost on the number of sites for each server so that you have the choice to select a Carbon Neutral package or not.
We then selected a provider certified under the New South Wales Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme to purchase green house gas offsets from.
We even included a portion in our estimate to cover our operational, office and transport energy uses needed to produce each package.

This gives you the peace of mind of knowing your Carbon Neutral package is truly fully offset through credible, government certified providers and not just smoke and mirrors as it may be in other cases.

Ongoing site management

When your website is built and live, this will mark the beginning of its usefulness to your business, not the end. This means you need the tools to manage the site once it's gone live.

Tools such as:

Design selector so you can change your design completely at any time, as often as you want.
The ability to add, delete, rename, move any page or group of pages with a simple point and click.
Design editor with the flexibility to upload different images or even a completely custom stylesheet.
Website usage statistics that is right there at your finger tips, without having to start another application.You can even turn on and off features if you want to have the ultimate control over your website.

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