The Servee Story
A brief introduction to an amazingly transparent content managment system and a stellar business solution.
By Kasey Kelly,
Graphic Designer and co-founder of Servee.com
As a graphic designer, I am expected (by clients and employers alike) to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. If a client needs a full identity system, complete with logo, letterhead, brochure, billboard campaign and website, I need to be able to deliver. When I first started working as a designer, the technical side of print work came easily enough. I can pick up new software programs quickly, and I easily understood the mechanics of the printing process. I can, after all, hold a printed piece in my hand. I can see and feel the difference between a gloss aqueous finish and a satin varnish on a coated stock paper.
The web is different.
There is CODE. Early in my career, hitting the "view source" button in my browser window was like staring straight into the matrix. Being an incredibly visual person, tools like Dreamweaver were indispensable to me. They allowed me to say "Sure, I can build a website!" When asked to implement a content management system, however, I had to enlist the help of outside developers. Ultimately, that hurt the bottom line. Web developers are expensive, and with our clients' limited budget, that meant less time and money could be spent in-house.
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I remember my senior year of high school, when my brother Issac was in eighth grade. I made fun of him for keeping O'Reilly Media language manuals next to his bed. While most of his friends were reading The Hardy Boys, Issac couldn't get enough of The C++ Cookbook. So I poked fun, despite the fact that I was a 17-year-old who was still reading comic books. Fast-forward several years, and I was lamenting to him about my problem with developers. Issac had been a freelance developer for me, helping to implement an open-source CMS for a rather large client of ours. He appreciated when I sent work his way, but he understood the problem. I wanted to be able to build a good content management system myself, but learning server languages didn't interest me at all.
Issac did a good bit of research trying to find a good open-source CMS that would do everything that we needed it to do, but he didn't have much luck. They were either extremely bloated on the backend, or overly complicated for the end user. Often, they were both. After scrounging around to the end of the internet and back, he decided to build his own. He was not only knowledgeable enough to write a sturdy software program, but he had a unique insight that not many web application developers have: that of a classically trained designer. We each brought different goals to this project, and the result is a CMS that is intuitive for the end user, easy to build upon for the designer, and full of features for the web developer.
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Servee is more than just a solid CMS. Servee sites have the ability to incorporate RSS feeds, podcasts, calendars, and e-newsletters. With Servee, a typical company website can change from a static brochure-style site to a tool that is integral to the company's success. Stay tuned to this blog for updates on new ways that Servee can work for your business.