Editorial Clarity

A great CMS drives site content by having more deeply powerful yet easy-to-use editing tools.

ByteCMS isn't a one-size-fits-all CMS -- every organization has its own goals, content and strategy. Using a CMS that's a custom fit positions our clients for success by making updates easy and immediate, but also by having the right tools, data sources and content editors along with smart campaigns and in-site promotion tools that help visitors discover the right content and reach the site's goals.

What is content?

There are a myriad of factors that make a website successful, and our job is to create the vessel for that success. Great vessels aren't done once they launched, they're just starting their journey of communication. Good content fuels that journey.

Content can be any sort of messaging, from an "about" page or "key staff" page or a "specials" database that tells the news and promotes the organization's goals. Websites are highly content driven, and people are only there for that content, and search engines only work if there's worthwhile content.

We believe the best content isn't something that can come from an outside agency like Byte. It needs to come from within an organization. So our job is to help develop a content strategy, help identify content sources, build tools to make adding new and worthwhile content as easy as possible, and help our clients understand how it all works.

An off-the-shelf CMS will help manage content, pure and simple. It doesn't help with strategy, it doesn't have content-specific tools and it certainly isn't going to help administrators know much about what's working on the site. The best off-the-shelf CMS is a word processor for the web with the least impediments.

What does a basic CMS do?

What does a great CMS do better?

We believe that a CMS can do a lot more than be a word processor. It can help drive better content by having better tools. It can have an editorial calendar. It can create editorial clarity.

We don't have a one-size-fits-all CMS because most websites can't become true resources with that. Instead we have a custom CMS that we're building for each client, and because of our partnership with our clients, each one helps us learn about better ways to manage content.

Since it's our own CMS, finding a better way to manage content means we can build better software, and since we've been doing this for 15 years, we have a fully unique vision and some great software that's helping to put some pretty amazing sites on the map.

Only the authors of off-the-shelf CMS software can make it into something that's useful for each client. So when you invest in something off-the-shelf, it won't really be for you. We are the authors of our own CMS, and there's nothing we can't do for our clients.

The amplification of tiny impediments

We've learned over the years that any tiny impediment to making changes on a site will result in less visitors. Simply, any difficulty will make a small change happen less, and less site changes means less relevant content for visitors, and less relevant content means people won't see the site as the resource it could be. And it's cyclical, because if a site has less visitors, it'll won't be seen as an effective communication channel, thus even less updates.

One of primary tasks in building ByteCMS is to remove any impediments that prevent site changes. One of the great advantages of creating and updating our own CMS is that we can change core functionality to make it better for users and power users, so our CMS is constantly getting upgrades and becoming incrementally better.