As the landscape of traditional marketing has changed over the past decade, the public website has become the most critical component of the marketing plan for many businesses. An organization’s public web presence is often the primary vehicle to attract, communicate with, support, and retain customers, partners, current and future employees, and investors.
One of the common challenges with public websites is that while they are typically owned by the marketing or corporate communications department within an organization, changes to the website are often required to funnel through the IT department. The marketing team would rather control the website directly in order to make timely updates to the site and likewise the IT team usually has no desire to be involved in the website maintenance. Unfortunately though, given the technology foundation of many websites, there is sometimes no choice but to involve the IT team with website changes. The answer to this common dilemma is a robust website content management solution that allows the non-technical user to effectively control, manage, and extend website content.
Robust content management solutions allow an organization to benefit from:
- Unlimited flexibility with branding and user experience
- Unified branding and user experience across multiple public sites and private portals
- Enterprise-class content management capabilities, including multi-level approval, publishing workflow, and content scheduling
- Content targeting capabilities based on customer information
- The ability to develop custom functionality or entire applications within the website platform
- Built-in blogging functionality and the ability to facilitate communication with the customer
- The ability to embed Flash and Silverlight rich media applications
- The ability to incorporate and present information from other line of business applications
- A robust built-in website and enterprise search capability
- Reporting and website analytics that enable site owners to gauge the effectiveness of online strategies
- The ability to optimize for organic search ranking within leading search engines such as Microsoft Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Ask
- A comprehensive security model to control access to content as well as publishing rights
- A high availability solution with robust performance and scalability
Northridge helps clients accomplish public website objectives in two key ways. First, our Northridge Interactive sister division is a leading public website design and development team that has a deep portfolio of compelling website solutions for nationally-recognized brands. Second, we leverage Microsoft SharePoint to provide a robust content management solution that enables the marketing or corporate communications department to retain full control over the website’s content and future growth.
Northridge has taken the SharePoint platform and extended it with key customizations to provide a comprehensive enterprise solution for public websites. SharePoint is an excellent technology platform to deliver the tools and capabilities needed to successfully build and manage an enterprise website solution. It provides native integration with other Microsoft technologies to support authoring, analytics and security as well as web content management. The content management platform can also be integrated with an organization's existing SharePoint portal to provide a single platform for enterprise content management.
In delivering solutions for our clients, we utilize our proven True North Methodology™ that enables consistently on-time and on-budget engagements. By combining SharePoint with the design and marketing talents of Northridge Interactive, we are able to create award-winning websites with rich user experiences and robust content management functionality. In fact, this Northridge.com website itself was designed by our Interactive division and leverages SharePoint for content management.
For easily-manageable public website solutions with compelling user experiences that drive market demand and foster client relationships, Northridge and Northridge Interactive combine to offer an unmatched value proposition to our clients.