Do you ever look at your company’s IT and think that what you want to do is just not possible; too expensive, or something that only your competitors could realistically achieve?
One Man’s Impossible is another Man’s Opportunity
Sometimes service providers and IT enablers find it is so easy to get carried away with technology that we forget that people running a business don’t want to hear a whole quandary of buzzwords when they ask a question; they want a simple solution to a problem that is not their core activity.
I worked with a start-up recently who wanted an internet presence that was easy for their customers to use; with on-line sales, memberships, subscriptions, feedback, imme
diacy and a professional look and feel to rival the giants. They also wanted to be able to add and manage content themselves.
As a techie, the tendency is to rush out the standard hokum of JavaScript, React, MySQL et al – all good technologies but wouldn’t we just be reinventing the wheel when a good Content Management System could do the job just as well?
WordPress – The Content Management System the world forgot
In 2017, WordPress boasted an impressive 75million users, but it is a product not without a certain degree of confusion.
++ For a start WordPress is the name of the product, which can be downloaded from WordPress.org and is also the name of the biggest WordPress SAAS host, WordPress.com.
++ Secondly, WordPress appears to be used predominantly by people using the simplest solutions available – which means that every WordPress site tends to look the same; and to make matters worse, nobody realises that the really good WordPress sites are actually running WordPress.
++ Thirdly, the ability to host WordPress in the Cloud is sadly lost on a lot of people. For instance, did you know that you could spin up an instance of WordPress on Amazon Cloud using their LightSail service in less than 5 minutes and have your personal domain registered and pointing at it? You could even have a full e-commerce solution running in just a few hours.
Learning Management Solution
The start-up I was working with wanted a Learning Management Solution – in other words, their own version of Udemy. As I started researching their requirements, I quickly found a whole plethora of Themes, Tools and Plugins that would provide exactly what they wanted.
2 days later and they now have a solution running in Amazon Cloud that costs them a fraction of what they expected; supports videos, memberships, subscriptions, online payments including PayPal and Stripe, Facebook Login, LinkedIn Login, auto-backups and they can edit their content themselves quickly and easily whenever they want.
The great news is that as they grow, because they are hosted in Amazon Cloud, they can take advantage of everything else Amazon has to offer whenever they want – from Voice Recognition and Artificial Intelligence to integration with Amazon Alexa and realistic Speech Synthesis.
The Moral of the Story
No problem is too big for the cloud and no solution is too small. Sometimes it is better to ask for help than it is to simply think that what you would like to do with your company and its online presence is nothing more than an expensive pipedream.
John Dunning works for 1Tech, an AWS Cloud Partner.