WebWiz@rd Website & Content Management Tool

Recently I was able to have a sneak peek at the soon to be launched WebWiz@rd website & content management tool by REM Web Solutions. For those that are not familiar with WebWiz@rd it is a proprietary website management tool and content management framework (CMF) written in ColdFusion 8 and is licensed via Software as a Service (SaaS) for commercial and not for profit use. It is used by about 500 companies today. The 3.0 version of it looks incredibly slick and much more user friendly then Wordpress, Joomla or any other website content management system I am aware of. Below is a summary of what I liked, what might be some of the drawbacks of the program and what I hope they improve in the future.

What I Liked About The Functionality

- the control panel home page....it looks super cool and is very easy to find what ever you want, plus you can easily customize it

- very intuitive (it was much easier for me to figure out how to post a new page than any other program I have tried)

- the page version feature (it allows you to create different page versions and test them before going live, plus keep old page versions so that you can revert back to them at any time. This is especially great if you want to show different page version at different seasons of the year. This feature keeps them all sorted neatly as well as you only see the page versions for one particular page at a time, it is very slick)

- you can resize images on your server right within WebWiz@rd

- the browse server button when inserting a link on a page (it lets you select any image, document or page on your website to insert, you don't need to find out the path of the file on your server and type it in)

- it includes a bread crumb trail so that you always know where within the tool you are and the path you took to get there

Cons Versus Other Programs

- less selection of plugin options

- minimal online forums and discussions for when run into technical difficulty (then again they have a free live tech support line, but sometimes for easy things it is nice to do a quick google search and get a quick answer)

- there are no free templates that you can easily migrate your existing website to, if you want a new design template you need to pay to have one created

Improvements I Hope Will Come In The Future

- a preview option in the photo gallery

- email reporting stats for the email newsletter module

- a quicker and easier way to get to the page versions section

- an easier way to find out additional features I can plug into the site

- more options for how the photos look and are displayed in a photo gallery on the site

- some free templates that can be applied if the webmaster decides they would like to change the look of their site, which options for how to modify the colors and images of those templates