Thinking about building a new website? If so, don’t build it from scratch. The number one reason companies call in DMZ Interactive is because their IT department has already built a website that isn’t good enough. In fact, most inhouse sites can be far inferior to what’s available to everyone as free open source content management system (CMS) software. Why? Most homegrown websites are hard to update by marketers, are not optimized properly for SEO, and are not correctly integrated with marketing systems. Today there is absolutely no reason to build a corporate website on anything but an open source CMS. Choose one, and you address these issues right out of the box. It gets better: CMS software is FREE. That’s 100,000+ lines of tested and debugged code that you won’t have to pay your IT team to write from scratch, which is another bonus.
Even so, there are many CTOs and IT directors who still plunge forward and reinvent the wheel, wasting time and money while their inside team builds what every open source CMS delivers out of the box. Maybe it’s ego, boredom, or just complete ignorance of what’s available in open source CMS software. Don’t let your company be a victim of the “we’re engineers and we build everything internally” mindset. If you’re a marketer who is engaged in battle with the CTO or IT director over control of the website, here are 10 facts you can use to make your case, and end up with a better, more productive website that the CTO will thank you for later. Really.