Continuing my post from Friday on The Journal of Financial Planning’s article about building web sites… Ed McCarthy talks about outsourcing, but also spends some time discussing methods for advisors to build sites themselves, focusing mainly on Microsoft Expression Web, the replacement to Microsoft FrontPage. This is where I think he missed something–content management systems.

Microsoft Expression is a *great* product, but few people build web sites from scratch now. It’s much too complicated and there are better ways of doing it. A content management system is a framework for building web sites that allows you to “plug in” different modules. There are modules for blogging, for newsgroups, for a wiki, for document hosting, etc. It lets a tech-savvy person create a site with amazing functionality with little or no effort.

From Wikipedia (which itself is a type of content management system):

A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a Web site.^[1] Content management systems are deployed primarily for interactive use by a potentially large number of contributors. For example, the software for the website Wikipedia is based on a wiki, which is a particular type of content management system. For the purposes of this page, Content Management means Web Content Management. Other related forms of content management are listed below.

The content managed includes computer files, image media, audio files, electronic documents and web content. The idea behind a CMS is to make these files available inter-office, as well as over the web. A Content Management System would most often be used as an archive as well. Many companies use a CMS to store files in a non-proprietary form. Companies use a CMS to share files with ease, as most systems use server-based software, even further broadening file availability. As shown below, many Content Management Systems include a feature for Web Content, and some have a feature for a “workflow process”.

“Work flow” is the idea of moving an electronic document along for either approval, or for adding content. Some Content Management Systems will easily facilitate this process with email notification, and automated routing. This is ideally a collaborative creation of documents. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources.

The way it works is, first you pick a content management system. The two biggies out there for client-facing web sites are PHPNuke and DotNetNuke. (Nobody sane would use Wikipedia for a corporate site.) I used DotNetNuke to create the FinFolio site and it worked great for me.

You either install the Nuke software on a server in your office or go to a third party hosting provider. I would strongly recommend a hosting provider–the software is free, so you shouldn’t end up paying any more than you do for standard current web site hosting ($10-50/month). Here’s a list of hosting providers for DotNetNuke and for PHPNuke.

After you sign up for an account, and before you really start creating your site, you’ll want to “skin” it. This creates the look and feel of your site, including fonts, colors and graphics–everything but the logo. Don’t make your own skin , there are thousands of skins out there for purchase that were created by professional graphic designers for <$100. Here’s a good place to buy skins for DotNetNuke and for PHPNuke.

After picking a skin, you simply drop your logo on it to make it your own. You don’t need to know Photoshop or CSS unless you want to make changes to the skin. I made some minor, unnecessary changes to FinFolio’s skin that required some knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets. (I changed the font size.)

After you have the graphics in place, decide how your site will be structured and what “modules” you’ll be adding. There are numerous free modules, including a blog, forum, chat, document management, feedback, news, online store, and wiki. You can easily build a sophisticated client-facing hub with very little effort. All of the modules work with Nuke’s security system so users create an online login for themselves on your site and then use that login across all the modules. You can prevent anonymous users without logins from seeing certain areas of the site, and can even prevent clients from seeing parts of your site based on the state in which they reside.

Note: I’m using “easy” in the sense that five years ago, it would have taken a talented web developer months to build a site like this. Now, it can be done in a matter of days. A tech-savvy advisor should be able to handle it, but it’s not something a novice should attempt.

With your graphics and overall site structure in place, you can start adding your content. Explain what your company does, how to contact you, management philosophy etc. If you have a blog, you can start blogging. If you have forums or other password-protected areas of the site, you can set up logins for your clients.

Ongoing maintenance using a content management system is a breeze. You can log in from anywhere and make changes to the content. You can give others in your office the ability to make changes to certain areas of the site. You can even (someday) revamp the site by changing the graphics and colors simply by changing the site’s skin.

So there you have it, you can outsource your web sites to Advisor Sites and Lightport or you can build it from scratch in Microsoft Expression. This was an excellent (and overdue) article.