Business to Business (B2B) Sites and Business to Customer (B2C) Portals

An Olive Net Specialty

Olive Net specializes in developing clean, professional business designs for B2B and B2C portals. Our lead front-end (the bit you see) developer has extensive experience in corporate and high profile e-commerce sites and produces exceptionally high quality designs - 'pixel perfect' and fully standards compliant across all major web browsers.

A business portal would normally be implemented using a Content Management System (CMS) and for most uses we recommend the class leading Joomla. Joomla allows great flexibility with the possibility to quickly build a huge range of extra functionality in to a website.

Content Management Systems

Most people will have heard the term but may not be clear what it actually is and why a CMS is viewed as a fundamental start point for most modern websites.

The wikipedia article is a bit long winded for most so we aim here to give it to you in a nutshell, concentrating on what it does for you rather than how or why.

A CMS gives you a functioning website almost immediately and allows you to then apply your design and add your content (such as the article you are reading now). Normally you employ a web development agency to create the design for you and apply it to the CMS, and you would add the content with their help yourself via the online administrative pages of the CMS.

CMS vary enormously in their strengths and capabilities. One may offer you a huge array of functionality 'out of the box', where as others are simpler bare-bones systems that take plug-in modules, such as community forums or contact forms. Most customers would rely largely on the advice of a web development agency - us - to help you chose.

CMS vs Web Authoring Software (eg Dreamweaver) and Static Web Pages.

There is debate on this point, and the answer is that for very small organizations with an advanced internet user / web developer, a CMS may be an over-complication. Some web authoring software is very good at producing a set of web pages that are uploaded as if they were word processed documents.

For any website where more than one person needs to add or edit content, particularly if from more than one PC / location, then a CMS will almost certainly be a better choice. If any interactive functionality such as forums are required or might conceivably be in the future, then once again it is almost certainly better to chose a CMS. In short, the vast majority of organisations should use a CMS to run their corporate websites. As an added bonus, many leading CMS are free to use while good web authoring software normally isn't!

CMS / B2B Case Studies

To illustrate what we can do for your organization we have put together some short case studies:

• This website - the Olive Net B2B Site. Discusses the development of a simple corporate website using the excellent CMS Made Simple.
• Emergency Planning Solutions B2B / B2C Site. Discusses a more complex portal using the advanced Joomla CMS.