The City of Wentzville chose The Net Impact for their web design and development to create an innovative web marketing solution – powered by Auctori:city™, a content management system specifically tailored to cities.  From there, Wentzville was able to further customize their site to meet their needs.

Diana has been working at Wentzville since 2008.  The city’s web site was filled with useful information but difficult to navigate through. Updating the website wasn’t easy and because Wentzville was dependant on a developer to make the changes, it was also costly.
In 2009, Wentzville conducted an online survey to determine what features their residents wanted on the city’s website; the results determined residents wanted the website to be more capable of conducting city business online with easy, online access to city codes and records.

The City of Wentzville wanted their website to serve as the principal source of information for residents, businesses and visitors.

“The website is to serve as a portal to connect with citizenry, support our community’s merchants, businesses, and activities, and bring the people of Wentzville closer to each other and their government.”
Wentzville City Administrator, Diana Wright

With the help of The Net Impact, Wentzville’s administrative team and department heads were able to collaborate and develop the new website’s architecture.  The partnership resulted in the site including more location specific photography and greater citizen connectivity tools such as the option to sign- up for notifications on page updates, an interactive calendar, and the ability for users to email website pages to others – all created through modules already existing in Auctori:city’s content management system.

In addition to their main website, Wentzville has a presence on Facebook and Twitter to more intensely engage the community and share information with its citizens.  Wentzvillemo.org successfully integrates social media into its online presence with feeds to their website.

“A truly engaged community expects and participates in a variety of communication avenues that provide them the information they want, when and how they want to receive it.” said Wright.

In order to truly understand how residents are actually interating with the website, the website administrators have access to the website’s analytical statistics to indicate the site’s most-used features.  Through Auctori:city, the City of Wentzville’s website administrators now have the ability to access, change, and add new pages and information to their own website 24/7 without the hassle of calling a developer to add information.

In Juggle.com’s interview with Diana Wright, she explained that in 2-3 years, the City of Wentzville will see an increase in communication with their citizens and intend to reach people through video, mobile devices.  The process thus far, she explained, was demanding but rewarding.  The success is due to the commitment of the city’s team and the usability of Auctori:city’s user-friendly website.  Its usability will allow the websites administrators to continue to enhance the services and information to citizens, businesses, and visitors.

Visit The City of Wentzville’s awarding winning new website at www.wentzvillemo.org.

AIRHWAWK’s website includes different pages for product descriptions, retailer information, multimedia, events, press, and a ‘contact us’ form, all within Auctori’s search engine optimized platform. With Auctori, AIRHAWK now has the opportunity to strengthen their Internet presence and their overall brand reputation by giving their targeted community an attractive and professional, custom designed website, as well as the power to maintain their web content in real time.

In addition, because of KMT’s global presence, KMT’s Auctori site was configured to support separate international entities. Auctori is built on an i18n Frame with unicode elements allowing easy translation into other languages.  This allows website administrators who speak another language, to have his or her settings on their user profile  changed so that the CMS  interface is instantly translated into the user’s native language. KMT website administrators now have the access and flexibility to easily maintain their website from anywhere at anytime.

Check out their website at: www.kmtwaterjet.com. Other KMT website built in Auctori include: KMT Poland Waterjet, European English Waterjet, Spanish (Spain) Waterjet, French Waterjet, German Waterjet, Italian Waterjet, Mexico Waterjet, English site for Aqua-Dyne, English site for McCartney, Swedish Waterjet, Brazil Waterjet and Chinese Waterjet.

Auctori:law is a search engine friendly content management system that puts the power and control of a law firm’s website in the hands of attorneys and legal professionals. In addition to standard content management features, Auctori:law is equipped with features designed specifically for legal industry, such as an attorney biographies module, news and articles module, and an images module. In addition Auctori:law has partnered with The Net Impact, a St. Louis based online interactive Agency to provide to provide legal clients with Internet marketing and web design services.

At the exhibition, Auctori:law representatives were on hand to answer questions and show ALA members how Auctori:law can make maintaining law firm website stress-free. This was the first ever presence of Auctori:law at the Annual ALA Conference. In addition Auctori:law representation, Steve Thomas, led a vendor showcase session: “Growing Your Legal Business Through Social Media and Search Engine Optimization.”
This interactive presentation covered the hot topics of social media and search engine optimization and how they are relevant to the legal industry.

“Our team is very experienced in developing customized legal websites, and we designed the Auctori:law CMS based upon this experience. We have been able to integrate controls that make editing articles, biographies and documents as well as the general maintenance of your website content very straightforward and less time consuming,” said Andrea Bemis, Auctori:law Brand Manager.

The Auctori:law team had a successful trip to Boston and enjoyed meeting the ALA members! We enjoyed introducing the legal industry to Auctori:law and showing them how with our legal CMS, can make make maintaining your website stress-free!

Check out these great pictures from the exhibition!

Foodservice Center, Inc., a broadline food redistributor of the Midwest region, was in need of a redesigned website that could easily be maintained by their staff. The redistributor chose to place their new website design into the Auctori content management system. In placing their website into the CMS, Foodservice Center is now able to better control their professionally designed website internally. The Auctori team made it possible for Foodservice Center’s product categories to stand out by implementing a more effective way of laying out the logos for the company’s different divisions of food: frozen, refrigerated and dry. To place emphasis on specific products, a customized content area was created at the bottom of each page and rotates advertisements for featured products. Foodservice Center, a B2B company that measure success based upon the drive and commitment of their employees and their valued relationships with customers, suppliers, and buying group partners, provides access to a login portal for their “dealers” to easily obtain information online. In addition, a map was built into their website that makes it easy to view their partners by regions.

Powered by Auctori, Foodservice Center’s redesigned website is easy to maintain and highlights products and other important information, while creating an atmosphere for the redistributor’s communities to access information. Review other  CMS Case Studies to see how your company can increase the effectiveness of your professional website by implementing a CMS.

With the ever increasing pace of business done on the Internet, it is essential to keep your website current. The Auctori web content management system (WCMS) can help you do just that. Auctori is a proprietary fully supported International WCMS that puts the power and control of your website into your hands.  This unique and easy to use WCMS solution gives you the power to control your site by adding pages, images or even changing the menu dynamically all in an SEO friendly platform.

Why is Auctori the right CMS to meet all of YOUR individual online needs?

Do you want to be in control of the content on your site? Need an immediate change added to your website? By simply logging into a site through a secure, password-protected portal, site administrators can update content, change images, add announcements and make other instantaneous changes.

Do you want to pay less for web services? Forget about paying web developers and designers for every little change needed to your website. With Auctori, you hold power to make changes to your firm’s site as often as you like and with no change in cost.

Do you want your website to be search engine optimized? Unlike other Content Management Systems, Auctori is a web-based CMS built for SEO , and comes equipped with customized SEO features to maximize traffic and usability. Relax we’ll handle the SEO.

Do you want flexibility? We have a strong belief here at Auctori that your website is truly your website. If you decide to leave Auctori, we will deliver to you all artwork, imagery and supporting files needed to continue running your site elsewhere on a comparable hosting environment.

Don’t forget Auctori was created to save you work and time. Best of all, we offer unmatched support. Run into a problem? Just ask and we’ll take care of it.

When it comes to comparing costs, at a glance, the open-source option may sound like the way to go.  While an open-source CMS appears to be free on the surface it is far from it when you take into consideration the time and resources required to customize and support the website. Any developer will require a learning curve to master a new technology, and since the technology labor is the most expensive part of any customization project, businesses that choose open-source will inevitably end up paying for this learning curve. The real costs of an open-source CMS solution usually become visible only during implementation. When you consider the time it can take to customize an 0pen-source CMS, the costs can easily outstrip the costs of a proprietary CMS that delivers the functionality in one solution.

The world of technology has seen an abundance of growth in the past several years, and with this growth, has come a wave of specialization across industries and needs. Some firms have developed software specific to the legal industry with legal CMS, while other firms have focused on creating a CMS for municipalities or for non-profits. These firms have typically developed their own software, and architected these CMS platforms to meet the very specific needs of clients by extending and customizing their technology. Due to specialization, flexibility and operational efficiency, proprietary offerings can often outreach their open- source counterparts.

Here is an excellent excerpt from The Net Impact’s blog, regarding details to consider when choosing an open-source CMS:
      “There is not a corporate body with open source that is obliged to keep your personalized code and      customization in step with new releases and or required web-wide advances.  Once you pull a version off the shelf then it is an obligation of your team or your development partner to keep things running through all of the changes that move the web forward.  Is there a fee for that?  Sure but you are either paying that fee as a service expense or payroll expense anyway.  Your new site will need fixed, debugged and modernized.  That’s how it is.  Plan on it.  If up time is critical then you need a resource.  24/7 support? Inside or outside is up to you.”   Read the full article on The Net Impact’s Blog

Bottom Line: In the end, choosing a proprietary CMS and forming a strong partnership with a successful, established web development company  can not only result in a better outcome for your company, but also result in more money saved. Not to mention that successful CMS providers are around for a reason, they provide a value for their customers, that they can not find in using an open-source CMS.

There are a lot of options to be considered when choosing between implementing an open source CMS or a proprietary CMS, make sure you do your homework before investing the time and money, into a solution that may not be the right fit for your business.  Never forget that the main purpose of a CMS is to make creating and editing content simple and easy, and you should never sacrifice user-experience for functionality.