I've been a career newspaper and magazine publisher for nearly 25 years. That's 175 in dog years. Visions of luxurious retirement danced in my head in the 90's. Then came the web, which danced a little tango number on my vision. Not unlike many other publishers I wanted to embrace the web at my pace; a comfortable pace that allowed me to fold it into the paradigm of print publishing without a hitch.
One sunny afternoon in Santa Monica while hanging out with a friend, who is a programmer, inventor, artist, we visited a software developer friend of his. He was working on some new web projects to keep his software company alive. His eye was on search and how to generate income from creating great landing pages and convert traffic into sales. This wasn't his business. Rather it was a way to make income to cover his overhead. But he had a particularly good idea how search worked, having sold code to a couple of the major search engines a few years earlier to keep his business breathing.
What I witnessed created a sensation within me like having great sex and a root canal simultaneously. This was the nascent stage of contextual advertising and what he showed me excited and terrified me. I remarked that this would kill local newspapers. The guy who was making $20,000 a month generating landing pages for ads said, "I don't think that will happen because there isn't enough money at a local level to make this worthwhile." All I could think and not say was I hope to God other people like him make that assumption for a couple of more years to give me time to catch up.
Every waking moment after that was spent learning everything I could about web publishing trends. A couple of years later I persuaded the owners of a publishing company I worked for to buy a software development company that had a directory publishing platform that we could integrate into our existing sites.
Through that project I learned how little I still understood about actual development even as I began to see the bigger picture. I was fortunate to work with some very patient and understanding developers and engineers who fast-tracked my education.
One of the engineers from that project and I continued to develop ideas after the publishing company was sold. In April 2007, after we evaluated dozens of web frames and content management systems for nearly six months, we concluded that we could build a CMS that would incorporate many of the ideas we'd been kicking around for the past few years. We chose Django project web frame for a host of reasons, but mainly because it would allow us to develop and deploy in shorter cycles more rapidly.
Oasis CMS sprang from that impulse. It combines my many years of publishing experience and my partner's many years of engineering and development experience. We both hope you'll give it try.
Oasis CMS accomplishes the goals of most publishers. It's feature rich, yet easy to use. Which means publishers can allocate valuable resources to building traffic and income. Oasis is dedicated to continuous, rapid development of features to make media web publishing powerful, fun and profitable. Power and simplicity join forces in Oasis CMS.
Oasis CMS is easy to learn and easy to use, which means publishing content can be managed by staffers with minimal technical understanding. Our careful documentation for administrative users helps them do a better job publishing content.
Our development team seeks feedback from users to create a user-friendly environment. Continuous improvement of the administrative features creates a CMS that publishers can grow with more rapidly.
Oasis CMS comes with website templates that anticipate the user experience. Give users power to find what they want. Make it easy to quickly learn how to navigate an Oasis-driven site.
Publishers can use our templates as they are or customize them. They're created in cascading style sheets (CSS) and highly flexible, which means publishers can create a distinctive look and feel while maintaining a rich experience for site users.
Preparation for web publishing makes a big difference for administrative staff's success. Oasis provides tools to accomplish this. Your staff will be able to understand how a database works and how to structure data.
The better they understand how data is structured and entered into Oasis the better they can create a site that is useful for site users.
If you are interested in Oasis CMS, please contact Terry Garrett at terry@oasiscms.com or call 415-302-9583.