Author: smartz

The State of CMS Platforms in 2022

Is it time for a website refresh?

We’re living in one of the most hyper-competitive times to be in business. There’s more competition than ever before—with much of it happening on the extremely busy and constantly changing world that is the internet.

How can your company stand out within this crowded space?

To be successful, you need an online presence that’s as powerful as your well-designed brand. You need a content management system that’s easy to use but flexible enough that it can be customized. It needs to include the exact functionality to service your target market quickly and intuitively.

But with such a complex digital landscape in 2022, where do you start? Right here. Read on to learn about the current state of CMS platforms so you can make an informed decision about your business’s website.

What Makes a Captivating, Modern Website that Converts?

People who land on your website will form an opinion about it within a fraction of a second. They’ll decide whether it looks professional and trustworthy. They’ll determine if it adequately addresses the reason that they chose to enter the site in the first place (whether it solves their problem). Nearly instantly, people will decide whether they want to stay on your website to learn more—and potentially buy your products/services—or leave.

Ultimately, today’s businesses must find a way to immediately communicate that people are on the “right” website. The main driver of first impressions is the design of your website. Things like layout, typography, font size, and color schemes all influence visitors’ perception of your online brand—for better or for worse.

Some of the factors that can negatively affect people’s perceptions of websites include:

  • Complexity (busy layout vs. a clean, simple design)
  • Lack of navigation aids
  • Confusing information architecture
  • Small print
  • Too much text
  • Questionable use of color
  • Slow site speed
  • Poor search capabilities
  • Pop-up ads

Creating a captivating, modern website that converts comes down to adopting a user-first approach to web design. And that’s just as important for people visiting your site as it is for search engines.

When ranking websites, Google prioritizes page experience using Core Web Vitals. So, if you want your business’s website to appear on the first page of Google, you need to be considering search engine optimization factors such as usability, page speed, mobile-friendliness, and website security. The right content management system can help you achieve this.

What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A content management system, often called a CMS, is a web-based tool that allows authorized users to create and manage digital content—with little to no knowledge of programming languages like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. They allow businesses and organizations to operate websites without any knowledge of frontend or backend code.

Solutions vary from open-source software, hosted websites, and website builders. Some are installed on an on-site server while others are entirely cloud-based. Technically speaking, the CMS is made up of two parts:

  • A content management application (CMA), which is where you add and manage content on your website
  • A content delivery application (CDA), which is the backend process that translates what you input into what others see online.

Thankfully, most CMS platforms are built to be very much ‘What You See Is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG, pronounced ‘wizzy wig’). These editors function similarly to software most people are already familiar with, such as Microsoft Word. So they’re easy to use!

But content technologies, like most software, are ever evolving and increasingly sophisticated. There are many things to consider when selecting the right CMS for your business—or reassessing whether your current website is using the correct one for your growth trajectory.

The Most Popular CMS Platforms in 2022

Over the last 10+ years, there’s been massive adoption of CMSs within organizations of all sizes and across different industries. As marketers explored technology offerings and put them to the test, they exposed both the pros and cons of each platform. This real-world testing influenced the market share of CMS platforms over time.

Here’s a breakdown of the most popular CMS platforms on the web today.

The bottom line: when choosing a CMS, there is safety in numbers. What are most businesses using? Chances are there is a tested-and-true reason why they’ve made that choice.

Our Top CMS Platform Picks

For over two decades, Evolve Media has been building and branding websites that leave a lasting impression. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses and organizations grow thanks to strategic advice based on what’s proven to work. When people come to us for website advice, these are the platforms our award-winning agency recommends.

  1. WordPress

WordPress is the undisputed CMS market leader. Its origins date back to 2003 when it was used primarily as a hobby blogging platform. Since then, this open source software has developed substantially to include over 55,000 plugins, allowing people to add online stores, photo galleries, email marketing software, analytics, and more. WordPress prides itself on its accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use. WordPress is the web’s most popular CMS for good reason.

2. Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce platform first and a CMS second. For businesses that want customers to be able to purchase directly from their website, this is a great choice as it can be done easily and securely. Within its CMS interface, store owners can add, list, edit, and organize products, drag-and-drop product images, and track inventory and order fulfillment. With dozens of payment gateways, e-commerce is what Shopify does best.

3. Webflow

Webflow is an up-and-coming CMS that people often ask us about it. As a creative agency, we’re impressed by Webflow’s digital marketing, which is attracting the attention of designers, content strategists, and developers alike. There are no restrictive themes, clunky dashboards, or disconnected back end. Webflow’s online visual canvas allows you to create and update content right on your live website. It’s easy to translate Adobe designs and Figma prototypes into a live, fully-functional website—and even create immersive interactions and animations. Webflow has zero platform maintenance and has advanced technology to auto-update change sitewide. We’re hedging a bet that this CMS will quickly see mass adoption.

4. Squarespace

Compared to the other CMS platforms on tbk’s top pick list, Squarespace is but a simple website builder. It doesn’t have as much flexibility as WordPress, Shopify, or Webflow. But it still deserves a spot on our list. Why? Because it’s a wonderful option for small to medium businesses (SMBs) with limited marketing budget and/or basic website design needs. It certainly isn’t the right choice for enterprise-level businesses because of its limitations, but it does offer many website templates and has intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. Our agency regularly works with clients to add custom coding to Squarespace templates, modifying them so that this easy-to-use CMS platform delivers more for their brand.

How Do I Choose the Right CMS for My Business?

With so many CMS options, the question becomes: which one is right for my business? The choice is dependent on your unique business needs—not just now but as your company grows. You need a future-ready CMS that’s adaptable as things change over time.

Consider this: how important is e-commerce for your business? Do you already have a domain name and web hosting? Will your CMS be used for website marketing only, or do you need it to integrate for document management and record retention? Is there a need for an comes from mobile devices?

These are just some of the factors that will influence which CMS you choose:

  • Your budget
  • Your desire/need to include e-commerce
  • The current size of your business + your growth ambition
  • Your target audience

Budget Considerations

Cost is always a consideration when selecting software but remember: your website is often the first impression of your brand. Proper investment ensures that’s a positive one. Focus on which is the best solution for you, not just the cheapest one.

How much money you choose to invest in your marketing varies, but…

  • B2B companies should spend between 2 and 5% of their revenue on marketing
  • B2C companies should spend between 5 and 10% of their revenue on marketing since they usually have more marketing channels and customer segments

When determining a budget for your website improvements, factor in how much money you should allot to promoting the website and optimizing it for search engines. It doesn’t make sense to spend your entire budget on the website if no one can find it due to no budget being set aside for digital marketing and SEO.

e-Commerce Considerations

To say e-commerce has become an important factor in CMS choice is an understatement. E-commerce is booming, fueled by online shopping during the pandemic. And it shows no signs of slowing down.

A decade ago, eCommerce accounted for ~ 7% of total retail purchases. Now, e-commerce represents ~ 20% of spending through all channels.

Online shopping is hugely convenient, and COVID-19 helped normalize it. Now even older demographics are comfortable with online shopping because many of them learned how to navigate technology out of necessity during the lockdown. Younger demographics have come to expect more out of their online shopping experience, wanting the ability to see products from multiple angles and even try things on virtually.

As international shopping becomes increasingly accessible, more merchants are taking their businesses global, eager to start selling in new markets and capture a wealth of new customers. E-commerce is so popular that most people start searching for products on Amazon rather than search engines.

This is motivating retail sites to rethink what they can offer consumers through their own e-commerce websites to successfully compete with the retail giant, Amazon.

Why might consumers choose another retailer over Amazon?

Business Growth Considerations

What size is your business today? How much do you realistically anticipate it will grow within the next year? Within the next 5 years? What about a decade from now?

Measure your growth by looking at key metrics such as your operating profit margin (OPM), business assets, and market share. As your business grows, your website will likely require deeper integrations and more technologically sophisticated solutions. You may outgrow a standard CMS and need to consider Enterprise Content Management (sometimes called ECM).

By adopting a forward-thinking mindset, you’ll be more open-minded to find a solution that will work not only today, but one that will also evolve as your business grows.

Target Audience Considerations

In what areas of the world does most of your business originate? Is it mostly within your city, province/state, or country? Or do you service a national or international market? Defining your target market informs what localization and multi-lingual functionality your website may need.

Every market has a different set of norms, expectations, and competitive pressures—so what worked for you domestically may not translate perfectly into other countries and cultures. But new markets are playgrounds for innovation, unlocking new types of consumers. Just ensure you have the right website to service their unique needs.

WordPress asking for FTP to install plugin and theme

Please add following code is missing from  wp-config.php  file;

 

How to Remove Static, pub,cache and var folder in Magento 2

please use this command

rm -rf var/cache/* var/page_cache/* var/generation/*

wamp server offline showing a blank page

localhost blank

me Problem slove
Changing port is easy, BUT NOT RECOMMENDED

If you have SKYPE just configure it not to use port 80 and 443

Skype -> tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Connection
UnTick the checkbox next to “Use port 80 and 443as alternatives for incoming connections”

Kill Skype
restart Skype

Now using wamp, restart all services
Does the wamp manager icon go GREEN?

How to Starting Apache fail Ubuntu

Just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd stop
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity in wp

DON’T PANIC!

There is a simple solution for this. It doesn’t require some crazy plugin. It doesn’t require hiring a super hacker geek to fix it AND it won’t require hours upon hours of Google’ing for the solution.

Now, if you want to try there are a few possible solutions. You can try:

  1. Reading this helpful article on the RSS Validator site: http://feedvalidator.org/docs/error/WPBlankLine.html
  2. Try the FIX RSS FEED plugin for WordPress (didn’t work for my clients site at all)
  3. Paying someone lots of money [like me Wordpress Remove Blank Line From RSS Feed wordpress error on line 2 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document ] to do it for you.

Or you can simply do this yourself. It’s REALLY really simply and only require one file upload and one line of code. I’ll guide you through the whole process.

1) FIRST. Download the following file. http://wejn.org/stuff/wejnswpwhitespacefix.php.

If you’re a geek you can check it for yourself, but I (Piotr Krzyzek) assure you this file is Virus free. If you don’t trust that file, you can download the exact same file from my server which I won’t change at all. So you can 100% rest assure that this file is safe from my server. You can get But if you download it from my server, rename the file from the “.ph” extension to “.php” so that it will work on your server too.

2) After downloading, upload the .PHP file into your WordPress site ROOT directory. This means wherever the wp-config.php file is. Do NOT upload it into the themes folder, NOR the plugins folder. Only the root directory.

If you don’t understand that, it’s ok. Leave a comment or poke me a twitter and I’ll explain it better.

3) EDIT your index.php file and add the following right after the first line:

include("wejnswpwhitespacefix.php");

So at the end, your index.php should look something like this:


<?php
include("wejnswpwhitespacefix.php");
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

That’s of course a condensed version of the index.php file and your’s will probably have lots of comments and stuff in it. But the important thing is to add the include code right at the top.

After that, poof!

What is missing in application development lifecycle?

Today if you ask the CTO of any company – “What’s stopping IT from delivering a better ROI?” I bet one of the answers would be – Legacy Applications. While most CTO’s would agree that legacy applications are problem-some, all would agree that such applications are also integral to their daily operations. According to a research by Information Week , 70% of transactions are processed in COBOL. And also 70% of the IT budget is devoted to legacy application maintenance. This “keep the lights on” approach leads to billions wasted in maintenance efforts rather than being spent innovation.

What’s this blog about?

Most of you would already be aware of the disadvantages of legacy applications and I don’t want to bore you with the same reasons. Through this article, I want to provide my perspective on why companies land into this mess and how the standard “software development” lifecycle is contributing to this mess. My hope is that early stage startups or even existing enterprise firms can learn and avoid the problem of legacy applications.

Where does the problem start?

To start, let us describe a standard IT development project. The business team develops a case and getting the budget approved. The outsourced IT vendor/ internal IT team discusses the requirements with the business and development begins. Irrespective of the methodology (Agile/Waterfall) the rest of the path is pretty standard – Development team would work on smaller modules (agile) or the entire product development (waterfall) and hand it over to the QA team for testing. Any business changes are incorporated & tested and the product is launched. There is a lot of enthusiasm and excitement during the development phase and even for a few months post development where the business wants to fix any impending or new issues.

However post that all the enthusiasm about building a great solution dies, users get used to the small quirks, development team moves on the new projects and the business get involved elsewhere. This is the point where an IT application becomes destined to turn into a legacy IT application.

Business is focused on adding new modules/functionalities and not on updating the technology for existing modules. After a few years the application becomes so big that updating the technology of the entire application is expensive and risky. At this point the application has turned into a legacy application.

The bigger problem is- this is not a one-tie thing that can be easily overlooked. For businesses managing multiple applications, this is pretty much the lifecycle of every application. Things come to a dead-end/ standstill when an application becomes a legacy application.

What’s missing?

I am not saying that adding new modules is less important than updating the existing ones. I am pro innovation but all cogs need to move together to create a well-oiled wheel. While the focus should be on growth, analyzing newer technologies and updating modules should also be paid attention to.

How to ensure that innovation and technology updation move together

Each firm would have to analyze their application development process and figure at what point they start ignoring existing applications. Then processes need to be added to avoid that. I can explain how we at e.Soft technologies do it and ensure that our clients don’t bear the burden of legacy applications.

We utilize the ADTI (Analyze- Develop-Test-Improve) application development framework that ensures applications don’t turn into Legacy applications. The Analyze, Develop and Test phases are where we work together with you to understand your requirements, and craft an application that would meet your business requirements. But we sincerely believe IT should do more – more than just developing good applications. It’s time IT looks at how its contributing to the bottom line and what it needs to do to keep growing the bottom line. IT needs to motivate and push the business to focus to architectural improvements for current/ past projects, even if the team is working on a new project with a new business. And this is the “Improve” phase of our application development framework

Even after the application is successfully deployed, we work with the business (and keep them motivated) to keep improving the deployed application; be it improving UX and userflow, optimizing codebase or updating technology.

We help stakeholders create business cases for how small (but consistent) changes NOW, and prevent large, risky and expensive efforts in the future. Through consistent application improvisation we help businesses cut down on maintenance costs and utilize that budget for innovation.

Results from the “Improvement” Phase

For 4 of our major clients, the “improvement” phase of software development has never stopped since project inception and as a result their average application maintenance spend is about 10% of their IT budget

 

magento 2.2 upgrade to latest version step by step instructions

The first step:

Before you do anything: go ahead and back up your store, we’ll need to back up the database and database, this should be a smooth upgrade but you never know (it’s Magento after all …) You will be grateful because you can downgrade to a functional version of Easily store your magento if an error occurs during the upgrade process. It’s important to back up your store for things like this, don’t underestimate the step!

You can do this with Magento CLI or, for your peace of mind, you may prefer to export the database manually.

We’ll assume you use a reasonable method to issue and maintain a magento store code base, such as GIT or SVN. We will be using GIT so we can create a new branch and use this branch to upgrade from Magento 2.2 to Magento 2.3 and test it before integrating it back into its main branch. Make sure to make a backup copy of composer.json on your warehouse.

 

The second step:

 

With the safely backed magento store, we can go ahead and start the upgrade process. It’s relatively easy in Magento 2 as most of it is processed by updating your composer file. This is generally done through the command line. Run the following commands to start the update process.

This will add new Magento 2.3 dependencies to your composer file:

 

This will add third party dependencies that the new 2.3 system uses:

This will remove some third party dependencies that are no longer used:

 

 

 

 

Now open the  composer.json  file and add  Zend\\Mvc\\Controller\\“: “setup/src/Zend/Mvc/Controller/  into the “psr-4” section.
The psr-4 section in your composer file should now look like the following:

The remote end hung up unexpectedly git

Other solutions didn’t work in my case, doing a garbage collection fixed it for me:

git gc --aggressive

Magento 2.3.5 CSS and Js not loading

Here is the simplest solution if showing version name in css path

like : pub/static/version323334/

then run this query in mysql
INSERT INTO core_config_data (path, value) VALUES (‘dev/static/sign’, 0)
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE value = 0;

after that clear the config cache

 bin/magento cache:clean config

Second solution 

Run query in database : INSERT INTO core_config_data (scope, scope_id, path, value) VALUES (‘default’, 0, ‘dev/static/sign’, ‘0’);

Third Solutions

php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy