Many publications spend endless hours or even days producing their online site. Even after such labor-intensive effort, too often a publication is forced to make do with an amateurish look that's increasingly outdated as web technology matures. Dispatch can bring this process down to a fraction of that time, freeing up staff and adding powerful features previously impossible with manual coding. The bottom line is that individual publications can't possibly keep up in style, technology, and features with the "deep pocket" competitors surrounding them—to do so would be cost prohibitive. With continuous upgrades and a modular system architecture, Dispatch gives you the necessary edge to embrace and exploit expanding online technologies.

Leveraging your Content

DesertNet software has always embraced the importance of archived content as a critical element of increasing traffic. The Dispatch program is designed to enable relationships based on authors, artists, keywords, articles, subjects, sections, story types, dates, page positions, column threads and other relationships specific to your site's needs. The result is a highly connected site that utilizes every article within a publication's history. These connections allow for your readers to easily explore infinite reader paths, resulting in increased overall site traffic.

Dynamic Versus Static

The challenges in designing and maintaining an online publication can be daunting. After the initial leap from print media to an interactive website, increasing site traffic, leveraging archival content, and creating a rewarding experience for web readers—one that's stylistically fresh and on the cutting edge technologically— present new concerns and opportunities for publishers.

Many of these challenges are resolved by implementing a dynamic site structure, and by using template and database-driven archival software.

Actionable Management Reports

Even the most sophisticated log analysis software can only analyze file names and report how many hits or impressions they received. This information can be useful, but it really doesn't contain enough data to effectively evaluate a site's successes and failings. By merging your publication's traffic logs and content database, Dispatch Statistics picks up where log software stops, providing a revolutionary new way to analyze site traffic.

With Dispatch Statistics, you can determine what subject matter is being read, if readers prefer short pages versus long pages, who the most popular authors are, what the most frequently read stories have in common, historical trends and so much more. This information can be used to aid in page design, provide in-depth data for advertising and sponsorship purposes, or steer the content of your online publication by allowing you to focus on what your readers want.

Editorial Control

Dispatch is client/server database-driven software. The "client" is any web browser, such as Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer. This means publishers do not need to install any special software, and can control and manage sites via their everyday browser. They can even edit live pages, change headlines, bylines, and add copy within their web browser, eliminating the need to download files or learn HTML. This simplicity of control not only reduces human error, it eliminates costly training while granting editors and writers direct involvement with quality control.

Design Templates

Dispatch can literally produce any style of publication on the web, including sites like C|Net, Weekly Wire, Slate, Suck, Salon or any hybrid or mutation imaginable. Production is achieved by using fully customizable templates and dynamic, variable "tags" that plug into the Dispatch database. This toolbox of tags is essentially an extension of HTML, which can be combined and used to satisfy any design need. The templates can be edited at any time, and can include images, HTML, JavaScript, Dispatch tags, macros, and all browser-based future technologies.

E-commerce

With Dispatch’s ability to efficiently create a compelling, dynamic web site, your readers will spend more time on your site as they browse the richness and depth of your current and past content. The more time that is spent, the more pages that are generated, the more opportunities you have to sell advertising and generate e-commerce revenue.

As revenue opportunities expand beyond simple banner advertising, tools to integrate these various revenue opportunities must become more sophisticated. Dispatch has the ability to manage the integration of these revenue opportunities automatically using simplified commands, handling multiple revenue partners.

Security and Reliability

Frequently publications trade advertisements and services for hosting, or run their own web server in-house. Regardless, they probably aren't getting the performance they need to be an effective presence on the web. Dispatch offers optional hosting services that include fast, reliable, and secure servers, RAID systems, 24/7 monitoring, and redundant T1 pipelines. Dispatch also offers multiple layers of authentication to provide for maximum security. Options such as server-based authentication and IP restrictions define which unique computers and users can access the interface.

Weekly Wire and Dispatch Automated Publishing Solutions are trademarks of DesertNet. Netscape, Microsoft, C|Net, Slate, Suck, and Salon are trademarks of their respective owners, and not affiliated with DesertNet or Dispatch Automated Publishing Solutions.