1. You can now upload and save articles in HTML file format to a local disk. To access this feature, select Edit Mode, and then place the cursor in the article, followed by a right click of the mouse.
2. Upload image files as large as 1.2 mb. This is a whopping increase from 50kb. Basic instructions on how to upload your imagesinto Webtreepro is available in the Webtreepro Knowledge Center.
3. Configure your expired page and content email notifications to be sent to any email address of your choice. You are no longer limited to the owner of the page or content. The Webtreepro Knowledge Center provides detail instruction on the use of expiration notices for pages and content.
4. All Webtreepro sites now have the ability to display the latest items from any standard RSS feed, using the RSS Reader. This feature is simply added to any page of your choosing, using the Add Content wizard.
5. Lastly, Webtreepro now features Advanced Site Grouping. You can now create very deep groupings for your sites and manage the publishing of pages and content to those groups without having to manually select each local site.

WEBTREEPRO CONTINUES TO GROW

Primero Systems announced that Alliance Cost Containment has selected the Webtreepro platform to power their online presence. 

"We’re looking forward to giving our entire system a larger footprint on the Internet,” said Miles Lee, President of Alliance Cost Containment. "Because our Principals serve a local market community, the ability for us to enhance our results in local search is an important part of each franchisee’s portfolio growth. This not only applies to our customer acquisition, but also will help us sourcing local vendor partners as well,” added Lee.

Read more. . .

WEBTREEPRO'S RECENT RELEASE INCLUDES AN RSS READER

WEBTREEPRO CHOSEN AS CMS FOR CRUISE HOLIDAYS
 

Cruise Holidays has selected Webtreepro as their franchise website builder and online content management system. While Webtreepro provides Cruise Holidays with numerous benefits, chief among these was the ability for franchise headquarters to provide each of the franchisee's websites with regionalized and specialized content. In the case of Cruise Holidays, their franchisees must be able to offer products that are regionally and lifestyle appropriate. Webtreepro provides this flexibility, all while maintaining franchise brand management. The complete press release is available on the Webtreepro website.

PREPPING YOUR SITE FOR SEO

The Webtreepro franchise website builder is a web-based franchise website development tool that offers the ability to easily search engine optimize franchise websites, both corporate and local, while allowing the local site to customize content pertinent to its location. 

These SEO tools include:

• Automatic creation of search engine friendly URL and page structure. Directory names reflect the page path as well as the content in the page.
• Site Navigation is automatically built as you add pages. In addition, moving or reorganizing the site is simplified by using a tree view. A breadcrumb widget is also available to help navigate the site.
• A sitemap is automatically created for submission to search engines.
• All internal linking is fully consistent and follows the same pattern.
• Alternative text is easily added to images and links.
• Images are stored in their own directory.
• Title Tags (page names) are clear and customizable.
•  Label content as headings, where appropriate, using the content editor.
• Easily name pages (title tags), add descriptions of the pages, and keywords.
• A robust set of reports help the site owners understand the what, where, when, why and how of the traffic to each website.

These tools, however, have no value unless website content is compelling and well-constructed. Although Webtreepro can’t write the content for you, it does offer a superb, simple-to-use on page content editor.

Q&A WITH WEBTREEPRO

The franchise business model presents some very unique challenges when it comes to building and maintaining an online presence.  The challenge comes from the very assets that make a franchise successful:

- First is a compelling brand with positive customer equity — it must stand for something good and not be compromised.

- Second, is having a large footprint — in other words, lots of locations. Success breeds more success and the brand’s prominence and equity grows.

Ironically, it’s those very fundamentals to success that clash when it comes to a franchise system’s web presence:

- To protect my brand, I can’t deploy a site for every franchisee unless I want to manage them all which isn’t practical. 

- But by only having one site, I can’t leverage my size in terms of my search footprint, and I can really lose on local search. And, my content is generic for my entire system, which may not work if we offer regionalized products and services.

With the introduction of Webtreepro, the two mutually-exclusive options get combined into a best-of-both-worlds web presence. This represents a pretty significant shift in the way franchisors deploy their brand online and it also opens up a lot of possibilities. Recently, a prospect (now a customer) presented us with an extraordinarily thoughtful set of questions which go to the heart of the matter.

Franchisor:

Most franchise experts strongly encourage franchisors to have a single site with multiple sub-pages. What are the fundamental arguments in favor of allowing individual sites? What are the biggest risks of allowing individual sites?

Webtreepro:

This "monolithic site” perspective is based on risk avoidance around brand standards. It was a "lesser of two evils” argument. Historically, the risk of enabling individualized sites over which the franchisor loses control of their brand standards was too great compared to the perceived lack of benefits. Webtreepro first addresses the risk by ensuring the franchisor controls brand, look, feel and global message standards on all their sites. The franchisor retains connection to and ultimate control of ALL franchisee sites, even if they have their own domains. But the benefits of local, individualized franchisee websites has grown in importance. Most people now recognize that offering a site visitor more relevant information is beneficial to both the visitor and the franchisee. Offering content that varies by region, community or even location augments this experience. In addition, franchisees may find this provides added value/pride of ownership. This results in better engagement, which is always desirable. Finally, and perhaps most compelling, is the benefits in online search. Having a larger footprint of sites can help with organic search for the brand. Local sites contribute to success in organic Local Search, which is a trend of growing importance. Of course, locally relevant content within the pages also contributes to natural search.

Franchisor:

How much flexibility should franchisees typically get with respect to changing content on the individual sites? How does your software regulate the changes?  

Webtreepro:

The degree of flexibility you offer is entirely up to you and ranges from "None” whereby you control their local content (service bureau model) to allowing full control, or anything in between. You’re able to allow them to control a page, a section of pages, or even just an article within a page. You may also mete out different levels depending on your confidence in each franchisee’s ability. We typically suggest fairly limited initial access (maybe one or two pages) and then expand as your ecosystem’s comfort level grows.

Franchisor:

Does it allow for single change (e.g. press release) to impact each site automatically?

Webtreepro:

Webtreepro was designed so that a "single change” at HQ is instantly propagated to one, some or all sites, and it’s quite seamless. This can be the addition of a new page with content (such as a press release) or could be more modest, such as swapping out piece of content within a page or simply editing something pre-existing that’s shared.

Franchisor:

If I allow individual sites, who controls the domain addresses? Do you recommend that each URL be an iteration of the main URL (e.g. www.franchisor-name.com) or should each franchisee have the latitude to develop their own URL? 

Webtreepro:

We support your choice of full domains or sub-domains for each franchisee’s site. For example: If you use sub-domains and the parent site is www.franchisor-name.com, then the sub-domain would be http://franchisee_identity.franchisor-name.com.  If full domains are preferred, then you might register www.franchisee_identity.com. In the case of full domains for each franchisee, who registers and owns them is entirely up to you. We recommend the franchisor manage the domain registration so you can retain ownership. You simply direct your registrar to point the URL to our IP address. If you decide to use sub-domains, then only your main URL needs to be registered and you can create new franchisee sites by simply giving each one a unique sub-domain.

Franchisor:

What is the dividing line between the search engine strategy managed by corporate vs. the latitude each franchisee has to manage their own SEO strategy? What visibility does your software provide franchisors to make sure each franchisee isn’t overly aggressive their SEO strategy (e.g. poaching into another franchisees territory?)

Webtreepro:

Our permissions schema provides significant and granular control of who may do what. There’s a combination of our permissions and security settings that allows you to lock down the SEO attributes (META, Description, Keywords, Page Name, Menu Name and Page Title) on a franchisee site’s pages, while still enabling the franchisee to manage content on the page. This lets you control (or remediate) the page content — both that which is visible as well as the META data such as keywords, page descriptions, page titles, and optimized URLs.

Franchisor:

How much control do franchisors have over the presentation of the search results? I would like for each search result show the office location in the header (e.g. Rapid Refill - Atlanta, GA).

Webtreepro:

Each franchisees site is truly "theirs” and can be customized to differentiate them from others which also helps with SEO. Beyond what a visitor can see as page content, there are attributes such as the Page Title (what you see in the top of a browser, and/or a tab in the browser window) that can also be customized/ localized. Beyond that, we provide a place to enter and maintain a description for every page, which may get displayed Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This will depend on how consistent your SEO attributes are applied across your sites and individual page. Webtreepro provides all the tools needed to apply your on-page and on-site SEO strategy, without requiring any technical skill. This extends to META content as well as page naming, navigational structure, alt-text and more which all contribute to better SEO positioning and SERP summaries. These tools also make your site visitor’s experience friendlier, because we don’t use any cryptic or argument-filled URLs. Header tags in the browser’s title bar and the browser tabs will reflect the page name you enter, giving you that control.

Franchisor:

I have a separate site to capture new franchise inquiries (ww.costcontain.com). What , if any, benefits does your software provide vis a vis generating new franchise inquiries through a separate site?

Webtreepro:

Because webtreepro sites are SEO-friendly, you may find that you’re able to generate more organic search traffic which not only appeals in terms of cost-savings (vs. PPC or Portal Marketing), but also enables you to quickly update content, create online forms for inquiries, provide downloadable materials such as PDFs, etc. You can create a separate child site for franchise inquiries, or even just a series of linked pages that are with the headquarters site ...  these can even use a different look and feel if you opt for that.

Franchisor:

What design services do you provide?

Webtreepro:

This is an area we don’t serve, but there are several options that our customers have used with success. One extreme is we simply adapt your current website’s look and feel. At the other extreme is that you engage a designer/firm that works with you from scratch on a fully custom design. In the middle, some customers have purchased templates from online resources like www.templatemonster.com and we enable them within our platform. 

Franchisor:

What is the typical breakdown of the economics? Is there a master license fee paid by franchisor and individual license fees paid by the franchisees?

Webtreepro:

We bill the franchisor only and which allows the franchisor to re-sell the program. Because you may be adding a lot of value through the program itself and the content that you’ll provide, there’s likely an opportunity to mark up the sell price in order to make the program self-liquidating, and perhaps even a profit center.

THE REALITIES OF OPEN-SOURCE CMS

There’s been an ongoing debate among about the merits of using Open Source Web Content Management Systems (WCMS), vs. commercially developed versions. Each has benefits and liabilities, and both introduce some often overlooked complexities.  We believe that both options should be considered not on the perceived financial or social aspect, but rather on which delivers the fastest and most-cost effective outcome. Today, I want to offer some perspective on open source and I'll take up the commercial alternatives in a future post.

It’s absolutely true that the source code is available at no cost. But source code is a complex tool, not an outcome (website). What you then need to factor is the costs associated with using that tool which may be significant. 

Before you can lay down your first line of code, you have to install and maintain a hardware environment that’s compliant. Next, you’ll need professional, technical resources that can develop that source code into a functional framework for your sites. There are literally thousands of redevelopers making a healthy living out of making open source work and that money is coming from somewhere. Or you may have this skill in house, but chances are that’s not free either — you’re probably paying your employees. At the very least, there are opportunity costs of using your IT staff for website deployment and maintenance.

Once your code diverges from the core, you’re less able to leverage updates, features or bug fixes that are happening in the open source core. You can certainly mirror those items in your own version, but that won’t be free either. If you don’t keep up, there’s a risk that your sites end up on a burning platform. With web practices and standards ever changing, this risk is real.

At this point, you’ve also created a couple dependencies. Your development partner (if you’re not doing it yourself), owns the keys to your web kingdom, and you’ll be fully dependent on them for functional changes. While you may be able to manage your own content easily, your ability to develop new navigation and incorporate other customized elements could be severely constrained. We have quite a bit of experience picking up projects from companies that have taken a DIY approach or have been sold promises on the cheap only to find later they needed to start all over. Most franchisors and associations aren't prepared for this commitment as it draws resources away from their core business.

So what are the advantages of Open Source? Well, to begin with, it is free and if you’re a technically robust organization, it’s a viable alternative especially when you have ample resource bandwidth in IT. And you can do whatever you want with it, but it's a long-term commitment of resources.  This should lead to some high-level questions.

Question #1 is: 

Do we have plenty of technical resources to apply to this project?

If not, then Question #2 is:

Do we have ample funding to acquire the outside technical resources for this project?

If you’re still going, then Question #3 is:

Are we ready to commit financial and/or personnel resources for the long-term, as this will essentially be a build (vs. buy) commitment to technology?

And finally, Question #4 is:

Do we have plenty of time for prototyping, testing and code revision?

In summary, open source is not a solution that pops out of the box ready to go. If you’re searching for a web-based CMS to enable your non-technical users to communicate online, then there’s something self-defeating about needing a lot of technical support. It’s like inheriting a set of mechanics tools ... just having them doesn’t confer the ability to repair automobiles. This is where commercial CMS packages may have a much clearer advantage, providing they don’t replicate the same liabilities of cost, time and technical care and feeding of site and content management. They aren't monolithic in their abilities and require diligence when evaluating as well. 

I’ll be addressing the commercial CMS option in next week’s posting and we’ll explore total cost of ownership factors for both open and commercial CMS. 

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