WebEdit Professional allows you to create an html file and then edit the file. If you know what you are doing and only have a very few pages that will not change very often, it may be enough.
Pages and menus
The first problem comes with the menus in your website. With WebEdit Professional these must be manually created for every page in your website. If you add a page you then need to re-visit all the other pages and create a link in the menu to your new page. If you get it wrong you'll end up with dead links on your site.
By comparison, one click in 123Live adds a new page and puts the new page into all the relevant menus on your website.
Moving a page in the menu using WebEdit Professional involves manual editing of every page and is very easy to get wrong. With 123Live you just drag the page to a new position and everything else happens automatically.
The same issues apply if you need to change the name of the page in the menu, or want to change the filename (to improve search engine results for example). This is because WebEdit Professional is a page editor and does not know anything about the structure of the website. By comparison, 123Live holds your website in a SQL database and creates fully validated HTML pages when you publish your website.
123Live automatically applies an alternative style to the menu item for the currently selected page, so users always know which page they are looking at.
Section templates
Along with page templates, 123Live includes the facility for section templates. These allow repetitive data such as products, jobs listings or property details to be displayed in a uniform and attractive style. The number of section templates that can be added to a page is unlimited, and section templates can be selected and mixed as desired to create each page.
Sections within each page are discrete blocks that, like pages, can be easily 'dragged and dropped' to a new location on the page.
Publishing
Changes to your pages in WebEdit Professional are saved on a page-by-page basis, and become live on the internet as soon as they are published.
With 123Live your changes are made to an SQL database and only go live when you click 'publish'. This means that if you are half done with a page, or you are making changes to a series of related pages, you can delay making the changes public until all your changes are complete. This feature can save a lot of embarrassment.
Images
Although WebEdit Professional looks as if it allows the user to resize images, in fact it only changes the HTML height and width properties. The image itself is simply stretched or squashed to fit, rather than being properly resized and optimised. It is this disparity between the dimensions in the HTML code and the actual dimensions of the image that leads to the phenomenon of watching an apparently small image take ages to download - it's still a big image but shown in a small box.
WebEdit Professional does not prevent the aspect ratio from being distorted so you need to take care to calculate the appropriate width if you change the height and vice-versa, otherwise the image will appear distorted.
These limitations mean that to produce a professional result you will need to resize and optimise your images manually before uploading. And you'll need to do this whenever you change an image.
123Live allows users to upload images at full quality and size. The user can drag the edges to resize the image and when the site is published the image is properly resized and optimised on our servers as it would be in Photoshop or similar. The user never has to worry about image sizes or optimisation.
If the designer creates a template that includes images, all the user has to do is to select the image, and the system resizes it to fit the designers specification for the width or height. In other words, it always looks right.
Pricing
123Live will probably work out more expensive than WebEdit Professional because it is a full content management system rather than a page editor.
If you need a website for your business, then your time is money. If you change the content of your site regularly (and you should!), 123Live will pay for itself many times over by saving your time, and allowing you to get on with running your business.
The price you pay for WebEdit Professional will vary from company to company. WebEdit Professional is not a hosted solution like 123Live, and the hosting will be up to the web design company that you use to create your website. The quality of hosting and support can vary widely, and you generally get what you pay for, so it's wise to check this out before you commit.
123Live CMS hosting includes telephone support, high quality web hosting and email. There are no extra's. 123Live is an all-in-one solution tailored to small business.
See it working
Content management systems vary enormously in power, flexibility, speed of operation, skill level required and many other factors. The CMS you choose must be right for you, right for your website, and right for your business.
You will be living with your CMS for a long time, so we strongly recommend that you examine the various offerings in detail before you make a decision.
Call us on 0845 685 0031 to arrange a full
one-to-one demonstration with a CMS expert.
