What website features do I need?

Website Features

Here are some features you may want to consider for your website

• Store. A storefront allows you to sell products on your website. If you sell commercial products, books and journals, or other material, an online store will let your customers purchase your material through your website.
• Content management system. A website content manager allows you to change the contents of your website without having to ask your webmaster to do it. A good content manager is as easy to use as a word processor. ECS offers several levels of content managers, for adding basic articles, general content changes, realtors^® and for managing publications and journals with thousands of archived articles.
• Blog. A blog (web log) is a discussion forum where you can make posts and others can post comments and others can post comments in response. With news feeds and syndication (such as RSS), readers and aggregators. can easily monitor a number of blogs. The good thing about a blog is that it keeps people reading your material. A disadvantage is that you have to make relevant posts and also monitor the responses.
• Bulletin board. Bulletin boards or forums were in existence long before blogs. They are generally more structured than blogs - a bulletin board can have many sub-forums, each dedicated to a specific issue or location. For example, a bulletin board could have a forum for each individual state.
• Photo gallery. A photo gallery allows you or your webmaster to post your own photos to the website, along with captions and additional information. This is useful if you plan on adding a lot of photos. Note that even if you do not have a formal photo gallery, your webmaster can post photos to your website.
• Email campaign manager. An email campaign manager, like the ECS Directional Mail system, lets you compose and send out newsletters, alerts, and product announcements to people who sign up for them. The email can be "branded" with your logo and "look and feel". The manager does all the "heavy lifting", such as letting people sign up, sending the emails, and handling email bounces and unsubscribes.
• Realtor listings manager. A listings manger allows a realtor^® to maintain their own listings on their website. This includes photos, descriptions, and comprehensive search capability.
• Realtor services. This includes a range of features, such as MLS lookup, user access to prepared reports and studies, newsletters, mortgage calculators, mortgage rates and trends, affordability calculators, and community information.
• Audio. You may want to include audio announcements, or for that matter, musical performances (with permission) on your website. ECS is highly proficient at audio editing and adding audio to a website.
• Video. Video is a hot item. You can add video presentations, product announcements, press conferences, or videos of performances (with permission) to your website. ECS is proficient in video editing.

ECS encourages you to review our questionnaire to help determine features that you will require on your website.