Snorkel IT believes that the web shouldn't only be for 'geeks' who understand the complicated HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that makes up every site online. This was the driving force behind creating SnorkelCMS.
Snorkel IT will create your site's design and layout for you, with certain 'editable' areas - called 'Page Properties', which you then edit. From an editing point of view this breaks each page upto into 'bite size' chunks making it much easier to create and manage your pages as you don't need to worry about where things will appear on the page. Page properties can be things like text, images, flash, google maps and image galleries to name but a few, and these can be customised depending on what you need to achieve.
Text can be entered using a WYSIWYG editor, which stands for 'What You See Is What You Get' (an example is shown opposite) and it does what it says on the tin. If you've ever sent an email from a web mail client, such as Google Mail (GMail), Hotmail or Yahoo you'll have been using a WYSIWYG editior without even knowing it! We've customised ours to make it look very similar to Microsoft Word, so for those of you that have ever written a Word document will feel right at home. The toolbar lets you make a font bold, italic, change its colour, add images, flash movies, tables, lists and many more - just like you can do with Microsoft Word. It even has an 'undo' button for when you make the odd mistake!
In the early days of the web all pages were static HTML files, which meant making your site consistent became a bit of a pain, and if you wanted to change something that appeared on every page, like your logo or add an item to a menu you had to manually change EVERY HTML page that used it - far from ideal!
SnorkelCMS says goodbye to Static pages and embraces the newer and much better Dynamic approach which stores all the page content in a database and then creates the HTML pages 'on the fly' when a browser asks for it, let me explain...
SnorkelCMS sites are made up of one 'Master Page' which acts as a global template for your site. This Master Page takes care of the overall layout and look of your site, i.e. what goes where such as the menu, header, footer etc and how big and what colour certain elements should be. Crucially it defines one or more regions which can then be customised by one or more Page Templates. A page template is then created for each different type of page used in your site, for example a Home Page will look slightly different to 'Standard Content' Page which will look different to a Product Page, yet they'll all have the same header, menu in the same place and so on.
When you go to create a page in SnorkelCMS it will ask you what type of page you want to create and then ask you to fill in information needed for that page type, for example a standard page will typically have a Title and Body property, whereas a Product page will have Title, Description, Price, Colour and Image properties.
Oh and remember we said that adding an item to a menu in static sites is a pain, with SnorkelCMS's dynamic approach it's a breeze, in fact its so easy SnorkelCMS does it all by itself, simply create a page and bingo it automatically appears in the relevant place in the menu, on all relevant pages! And because of using a Master Page when you decide to re-brand your company or refresh the look of your site we only need to change one page, not every single one!
Making money online can be complicated and difficult to manage, but not anymore! SnorkelCMS has an ecommerce module that adds 'shopping basket' functionality to your site allowing your visitors to add your products to their basket before checking out and paying for their goods via seamless integration with one of the worlds most renowned online payment gateways - PayPal. PayPal will handle taking their debit/credit card details for you, removing the need for having an expensive merchant account, and will simply credit your PayPal account which you can then 'unload' into you bank account whenever you wish - and dont worry your customers don't even need to have a PayPal account to buy!
Getting yourself noticed online can be a tricky, time consuming and often expensive process which Snorkel IT doesn't agree with! Many companies will offer you 'guaranteed rankings' within leading search engines and to be honest this is a bit of a con, let us explain... Search engines work by 'crawling' the web with what's called a 'spider' (web > spider - get it!) so they'll start on a site and then visit each link on that site, and then each link on that page and so on, getting deeper and deeper as they go. So if your site is linked to from a site that a search engine already knows about you'll get ranked at some point (I'll come on to where you'll appear in a second). If you're new and not linked to from anywhere else you can submit your site to most search engines so they know to come and 'crawl' your site. Now many companies will charge you through the nose for this - something which we do for free - after all its hardly complicated: enter your URL and click submit!
Where you'll appear (your 'ranking') is a whole other kettle of fish. Many factors influence this, such as quality and relevance of your content, using specific terms in a certain way, having decent reciprocal links, having a decent amount of traffic (hits) and many more, however the biggest and often the most overlooked is how your site is designed and developed. There are thousands of companies out there who will charge the earth for improving your ranking - and some will succeed, but many won't as they won't tackle how your site is built. SnorkelCMS ensures that all its sites are build for Search Engine Optimsation (SEO) out of the box, making sure all its pages are valid XHTML (so the search engine spider can 'read and understand' it), making sure all non-text elements (e.g. images) have text alternative (Spiders can't understand pictures and videos!). All our pages have the relevant meta data (hidden information, specifically for browsers and spiders) so they no when to come back, and have the basic HTML elements so the spiders can understand what each bit of the page is for.
You've got a site, but who's visiting it? Is anyone visiting? Where are you visitors coming from? How long are they staying? All SnorkelCMS sites come with Google Analytics as standard, so all of the above questions and many more can be answered with the click of a mouse!
With Google Analytics you'll be able to learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. You'll get the information you need to write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and increase your sales.
You want your customers to know where you are and how to find you? Now you can add a professional touch for free using SnorkelCMS's Google Maps add in.
Simply login and select to edit your 'Contact/find us' page and enter your post code, Google Maps will then add a place mark to a map. You can then drag the marker to your exact location (as many people share their postcode with the entire street!), choose the type of map (either normal, hybrid or satelite image) and the zoom level and bingo job done.
Whether it be holiday snaps or your best selling product you'll want to show it off to world, and with SnorkelCMS's Gallery Module you can. Using the latest cross-browser JavaScript (dont worry you wont have to write it yourself, thats what SnorkelCMS is for!) you can get a fancy looking image gallery with clickable thumbnails (which SnorkelCMS will offer to create for you whenever you upload suitable images) that will reveal the full size images in a nice animated slideshow.
Populating a site, and keeping it up to date can be a daunting task all on your own. With SnorkelCMS you can create an unlimited number of extra content editors for free (many of our competitors charge per user!) to help you with the day to day running. Every change they made is recorded so you'll know who did what, and when, and with versioning you can roll back any changes you dont like.
Alternatively (and recommended!) we can set it up so that you can choose who's authorised as a 'publisher', all other users can only save drafts and would need a 'publisher' to actually make the page live to the public - offering you the ability to approve all content changes. Please contact us for more information, we can tailor these permissions to suit exactly how you'd like to work.
SnorkelCMS allows you to save 'drafts' of each page (much like when you're composing an email) and when you're ready and the page is just how you want it you can 'Publish' it to your site for everyone to see. Each time you save a draft (drafts are private and can only be seen by you) or publish a page SnrokelCMS keeps a copy of the page, including who changed it and when so if you make a mistake or decide you want to go back you can. With static HTML pages you'd have to trawl through backups (if you have any!) trying to recover an old version of a particular HTML file which you'd then have to upload via FTP, with SnorkelCMS you simply click 'Archive' and look down the list, clicking 'Preview' to see each one, then click 'Publish' to restore, how simple is that!