During today's webinar discussing the Utah Festival Opera's plans to revamp its website, we engaged in a discussion of platforms that I'd like to flesh out here. (A recording of the webinar is available for download.)

There are two basic ways to implement and manage a website:

• Use web authoring software on your local computer and upload new files to the web host whenever you make changes.
• Build your website on top of a platform with a web-based interface for making changes. (For example, this blog is built on an open source blogging platform called "b2evo.")

Creating a website using a web authoring tool such as Dreamweaver offers the greatest flexibility, but can be difficult to manage if more than 1 or 2 people are involved with the site. It may also require purchasing multiple copies of the software (although it is possible to create rudimentary web pages in Word).

Web-based platforms avoid the software issue, but each has pros and cons. Most are written by technical people for technical people, so finding one that people in your organization can use requires some research. There are hundreds of choices, some free, some free for awhile or until you need advanced features, and some with a one-time or monthly fee.

There are essentially four types of platforms, written with four types of basic uses in mind -- content management, customer relationship management, e-commerce and blogging. Each type can do everything you need, but the one written to address your situation will prove easier-to-use and more powerful.

• Content management systems (CMS) help organize large, complex collections of information, especially those that are database driven. CMS applications are popular with large corporations and government agencies. The two most popular platforms are Joomla and Drupal.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are geared for collecting and managing sales leads, so they are especially useful when you do your own online ticketing and have an aggressive social marketing program with a regular newsletter, promotions, demand pricing and so on. The two most popular are Salesforce and SugarCRM, and Patron Technology recently introduced a version of Salesforce tailored for arts groups.
• E-commerce systems are tuned to the needs of catalog-based selling, with robust database and shopping cart tools. Some arts groups use them to emphasize (subtly) that visitors to their site are there to purchase tickets or other products. The top two open source solutions are Magento and OpenCart.
• Blogging platforms are the easiest to use by far. They were written with the novice in mind. It takes a programmer or at least an advanced user to marry the blogging tool with the database and e-commerce functions your organization will need, but once the template has been designed and the plug-ins have been plugged in, blogging platforms are extremely reliable. The most popular are Blogger and Wordpress.

A few more thoughts:

• Make sure that whatever platform you choose offers both "basic" and "advanced" editing capabilities. Even the technophobes in your organization should be able to learn the basic style, but you will pull your hair out if your website doesn't offer an easy way for an advanced user to customize.
• The platform must include an option to preview changes before publishing them to the site. It will be convenient to push the job of updating website content off onto the stakeholders, but the marketing team and/or webmaster still needs to retain final approval.
• Try before you buy. Most web platforms are available as free downloads that are either totally free (but unsupported) or free for a trial period (and supported once you pay for them). It's the only way to discover which platforms will fit your needs and your organization before committing yourself forever.
• Keep the future in mind. If you plan to implement a CRM system in the future, consider adopting the system first for your website. That way, when you choose to integrate your patron data collection and ticket sales, your website will ready.

One final, final thought. During the webinar an attendee asked about Flash (the Utah Festival Opera's current website is built using Flash). There are several problems with Flash. First, it makes the site harder to edit by novices. Second, not everyone uses Flash, and Apple has a vendetta against Flash, so some users won't be able to view your site properly if you use it. Third, if your whole site is built with Flash, search engines have trouble indexing it. Fourth, the sorts of things most arts organizations would use Flash for can be done using Java, which is more or less universal. And finally, it's temping to ring bells and to blow whistles if you have them, so sometimes you are better off leaving them out entirely.