Let's start with the fun stuff.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, although this is disputed, so no-one really knows what it stands for now.  Most website now call RSS "Web Feeds".  Web feeds are usually designated with a little orange symbol like this. A web feed is a system inside a website which allows users to receive regular updates from that website.Â

The following video from Marketing Profs explains RSS in more detail.

So why is RSS fun?  Because it saves you time surfing the net.  You just sign into a page like www.start.com, and then you copy the Feed link from your favourite websites into this page.  You can display the latest items from all of your favourite sites on this page, which means you won't need to check each site every day.  It will automatically update whenever your favourite websites update their sites.Â

CMS stands for Content Management System.  Sounds complicated, but it just refers to any system where you can edit pages of your website yourself, from your office.  There are various types of content management systems, from small systems which control just a few pages, to large systems which allow you total control over everything.  You can also request a custom content management sytem if money is no object, although these can be time consuming to construct.

We often suggest you use a partial content management system, which gives you control over the parts of your website which change frequently, like news articles and photo galleries, and the rest can be updated by a web designer.  This will make your site look better as web designers can usually do things that CMS's can't.

Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) are usually internal programs which allow companies to keep track of customers and record necessary details.  These days CRMs are becoming web-based which means that if your company has offices in different states, but needs to access the same database of clients, they now can.  Ah the wonders of the internet...

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.  No idea what this means?  Don't worry, you don't need to.  It is a new way of designing websites which makes them more flexible so they can be viewed by PDA's and other devices.  Formerly, websites were designed using complicated systems of tables.  CSS dispenses with the tables and relies on the designer to tell every object where to sit on the page.  This is also better for vision impaired users as screen readers take a long time to read all those table tags.  

It is not all roses with CSS however, as IE and Firefox can't agree on how to display certain things so web designers have to spend a lot of time tricking one or the other into displaying things how they want it.  CSS will certainly be the way of the future though, especially as some of these issues are slowly being ironed out.Â

So in summary, if you want a website with an RSS feed which incorporates a CMS and is designed in CSS, please give us a call.  If you company needs a custom CRM, we can also do this for you. 

If you are still thoroughly confused, never fear!  Just give us a call and we will talk you through the ones that are relevant to you.Â