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Unit Interactive’s New “Unify”
Ninety percent of the time, when a client wants a website made, they also want something that will be easy to update. After all, no one wants to wait (and pay) for a web developer to come in just to make a simple change to their content. In the past, the answer to this has been to give the client a crash course in HTML and tell them to cut and paste their way to glory, or to provide a Content Management System (CMS) they can use to log in and edit their content. Enter Unit Interactive’s Unify. Unify is a snap-in, easy-as-pie-to-install content editor for static sites. HTML is a huge hurdle to overcome, especially for older clients, but using a content management system pushes up the cost and effort levels, and pushes back the time frame for the project because the developer has to either spend time coding the CMS or theme-ing/skinning one. Each CMS has its own quirks and learning curve, so using one (especially one who’s templating system is unfamiliar to you) can sometimes mean the project time doubles while the developer learns the ins and outs of the system and proprietary syntax. Add to that the fact that the client needs to learn a new interface.
Unity is in that perfect place between a completely static HTML site and one that runs on a CMS. It doesn’t require a CMS, database, back-end interface, or new proprietary tags, but gives the client an in-browser content editor. You can check out a video demo of Unify, and see how it just snaps into normal, semantic markup to allow editing without breaking the layout or risking the client editing the HTML themselves. Its mind bogglingly simple, and lets truly front end developers only worry about their design and the CSS/HTML. Plus, at a price of $16 per domain, it’s too good to be ignored. I’ll be offering it as an option to future clients effective immediately.