Simple ideas are the best
Caliban is one of those ideas that seem so obvious, but that no one else seems to have cottoned on to. We have been using it in-house for several months now, and the results are great. You save lots of time, avoid lots of aggravation and make adding content a breeze for anyone, regardless of technical ability. And your content has a habit of appearing at the top of search engine rankings.Caliban lets you build web pages quickly and accurately, without any need to test or upload them, so there's no worry about whether web links will work once you have it on the site.
It makes sure that your pages are automatically optimised for good search engine rankings, without resorting to the kind of spam techniques that can get your site barred if found out.
It makes sure that search engines find all of your site content, without you having to build links to new pages.
It encourages other users to link to your site, so that you get found and go up in the rankings. And you can monitor the searches that find you.
It lets you manage your content really effectively. With Caliban, you can build some or all of your pages from components - text blocks, menu bars and so - and instantly update tens, hundreds, or thousands of pages with just one change.
So many companies spent lots of money on a web site, only to leave it unchanged for months, or even years, because it was just to time-consuming or expensive. Others tried to solve that problem by having a database 'back end', not realising that this incredibly powerful content would be invisible to search engines and so never get found. Caliban solves all this.
This was the case with the all-important jobs database for creative and media recruitment company Workstation Solutions plc, another company in the same group. Pre-Caliban this was powered by a simple Access database, which was totally ignored by search engines. Now that the jobs site has been 'Calibanised', each job on the system gets found and indexed, and can, potentially, be automatically updated from the main in-house management system (in this case Enterprise 6).
And there are lots of small benefits too. Take URLs as an example. Managing a normal website generally means that you have to arrange your pages into directories and subdirectories, in order to impose order onto your tens, hundreds or thousands of pages. That's all fine, but it means that URLs tend to become long and unwieldy, which is not good for promotional purposes. Caliban, by contrast does all the arranging internally, with no need for subdirectories on your web server. Consequently your URLs stay short, elegant and memorable.
Like many obvious-in-hindsight ideas, Caliban is a good one and delivers real benefits virtually immediately.