The breadth and depth of GATE Village functionality is unparralleled for any ECM or WCM platform ... No Compromises indeed! Blending together in perfect harmony both the technical goo to ensure that Village functions for the members AND for the visitors that the SEO technology is sure to bring them. As of August 31, 2009, a search for "GATE Village" sees http://www.gatevillage.net appear as the fourth link on the first page ... not bad for a site that didn't publish content 3 months ago! That same technology is now hard at work putting RANT Tattoo, RANT Gallery, and RANT Computing on the search map.

The best part of that story is how automatic it all is, each content type in GATE Village is assigned reasonable default values for inclusion in the "sitemap.xml" ... which is actually so big it is in two files now: sitemap0.xml and sitemap1.xml. The map is maintained as tables within our database and automatically submitted to Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and ASK with new search engines being added as they become available.

With SEO Friend in place with public content types, the Village prompts content creators to provide all the information required for proper submission to search engines. You don't have to know what to do, you just have to follow simple instructions on an easy to use interface. None of this is rocket science, but there are a lot of important steps that if they aren't taken then all the hard work in content creation is almost for naught. There are many folks who DO understand SEO and so it is vital that your web site does as well or you will be lost in the search clutter.

But if all the Village did was to prompt you to do work, it would be little better than a note pad. GATE Village provides a great deal of automated help that like page title creation, automatic meta-tag inclusion, sitemap inclusion, copyright statements, URL rewriting (to ensure no duplicates) and a few other boring behind the sceans technology doing the work so you don't have to.

Work like Revision Control making sure you know who did what and when; keep a record or just keep safe. It isn't on all the time, that would be wasteful, but it is on the important content and can be controlled as to whom can circumvent it or not.

Beauty can't be sacrificed!

Too often ECM platforms provide clunky, hard to understand and use interfaces that are nearly impossible to change. That's no way to do business!