If you are a U.S. manufacturing company, you have very specific needs when designing, or upgrading, your website. Most critical is the choice you make on a content management system, or CMS. A CMS enables you to easily make changes to your website's content, allowing you to add pages, blogs, videos, and much more without third party assistance. You can authorize Admin rights, giving specific users the ability to make changes suited to their roles within the company. Marketing tasks can be handed over to that side of the business to manage, but other changes to the website, such as sales rep and supplier information, can remain off-limits, should you desire.
You can make these alterations to your website at any time. This is important if you need to distribute new information regarding pricing, or inventory updates. Many tasks that your business spends time on today could be made more efficient by sharing information online. The content management system makes it easy for your team to maintain various online portals, while giving you control of the user login and security protocols needed to ensure that users only see the information they are entitled to.
Putting the content in your CMS
The proper CMS will improve your website's search engine rankings. You'll need to perform keyword research, particularly a long-tail keyword search. With this information, you can introduce quality, helpful content in the form of blogs, videos, and press releases. Your CMS will feed search engines with material that will drive up your rankings and make you a global leader in your field. Do you need pages read in multiple languages? Your CMS can accomplish that. You can also optimize your URLs and page titles, and provide helpful links that will further increase your visibility. The ideal content management system allows you to easily manage all of these features through one central interface.
However, a content management system is only good if the content is easily accessible to everyone. By 2015 there should be almost twice as many mobile devices in use versus traditional PCs. Increasingly, the corporate world is moving to the mobile platform. Look inside any boardroom and you'll see mobile devices in the hands of the executives. Therefore, a responsive design CMS is vital to the success of your website; making it fully functional and easily navigable on any device.
Do your homework
As we have said many times, you need to do a little homework before you can make any decisions regarding your website design. Get a marketing analysis to determine where you stand with your competitors. What are your strengths and where can you improve? What website features do you want to see added to your site? What tools do you need?
Manufacturers need to position themselves to succeed in the ever expanding world market. Competition now comes from all directions on the map. You need to consider integrating all possible tools that will give you the edge. Your potential clients need to find you; your current clients need to have faith in your ability to change with the times. The properly selected CMS can put you on top of your field.