Content Management system (CMS), what the!?

You’ve had to have heard the term CMS by now. It’s everywhere. You get calls from companies or emails saying they can provide you a CMS or CMS website. What is a CMS and how can it help or effect your business?

A CMS stands for a Content Management System. When it refers to a website, it means it allows you to edit parts or pages of the website without any advacned or even intermediate technical skill. Put in short, Frontpage, Dreamweaver or even MS Word in your browser that allows even the most novice of technical or even web experience people to make advanced changes to your website. There are a few speciality companies out there that provide these types of websites solely to ticket brokers. ATBS and TicketPlatform are the main two. ATBS offers highly customizable XML websites that never look alike, are available on all three major exchanges and have no restrictions on your options. Your website can do anything. Some of the top ticket brokers in the nation use ATBS. TicketPlatform offers basically a minimally upgraded TicketNetwork plug-in website that can be picked out in a heat beat between 10 different websites. Unlike ATBS, TicketPlatform wants to rent their CMS website to you so you’ll never actually own it and you’re basically going from one cookie-cutter website to another and they try to get you on more monthly expense with their SEO packages and the like. I personally never understood how an SEO company could say they’re going to get you on top of the search engines and say the same thing to another ticket broker like TicketPlatform offers. Not to say TicketPlatform is all bad, but just trying to inform you from a ticket broker has been through the hoops of SEO companies, web design firms, offshore freelancers and the like.

A nice website could revolutionize your business if you’re a retail broker, wholesale or a little but of both. In too many ways to number, from higher search engine rankings to higher conversion rates from the customers who come to your website, CMS is there to help. It allows you or your tech staff to make fast changes to the front end of your website. If you don’t already have a CMS I recommend contacting both of the above companies to find out what’s best for you. Just keep in mind cheap isn’t always the best and you get what you pay for, the same as with your own inventory. Paying an individual or an inhouse designer to design you a fully functional XML CMS driven website will cost you many times what these 2 comapnies will chanrge you.