I am not easily impressed by every new technology that comes along, but Conversant — the software I’m using to manage my web sites now — blew me away. You can
sign up for a free Conversant site at Free-Conversant (which, unlike a lot of other free hosting sites, does not frame ads over your
content).
It took me about two weeks of using Free-Conversant to decide I had to move
all of my sites over to this system. There are many, many things I could say
about this system, but the bottom line always comes down to this: it makes updating
and maintaining a web site almost effortless which, in the long run, translates
into a better site and more revenue.
And, from my point of view, they are practically giving the software away.
This site is on a dedicated server which cost me $300 for set-up fees and a
$250 per month fee. I had been looking at just a plain old regular server to
dump my static site onto, and Rackspace charges that much just for the server without any content management
system. The cost for basic domain hosting — essentially 150 mb of server space
using your domain name — is also dirt cheap at $75 for setup and $35/month.
Conversant is one of the few technologies I have seen that I have not been
able to break. Most technological solutions to problems that actually reach
the marketplace do reasonably well at solving the core problem they were designed
for. Where technology usually breaks down is when the user decides to do something
that the designers had not anticipated. So far, there is very little that I’ve
found you cannot do in Conversant and every time I bring something up that I
cannot seem to do, it usually appears as a new feature very quickly.
Which brings me to the final reason why I chose Conversant — the folks at
Macrobyte who put it together. Not only
are the people who program the software available for tech support, but they
use the software themselves and seem to have an excellent understanding of the
challenges facing harried webmasters. A lot of the tools I buy and use regularly
often work, but in order to really exploit their power you have to start thinking
like a software engineer rather than a web master. Conversant, however, is extremely
intuitive and as such removes a lot of the boring, task-oriented chores that
a lot of web tools make you go through.