More than just pages
Notanant isn't a page-by-page website builder, but a genuine content management system where the content's meaning and purpose builds links, menus and summaries. And this is on top of a social networking and e-commerce.
In conventional websites are made by building pages, then linking those pages together. For small sites this works well to start. But links have to be built by hand and if, in the future you want to change the site structure, page-layout or design it can be very difficult resulting in a mess of link spaghetti or the need to rebuild from scratch.
Notanant is designed to understand how sites are structured and the types of content that will be used
Notanant uses a different approach to this page-by-page structure. Pages have a specific purpose or meaning. For instance pages in a 'news' content area can be referenced to bring 'news articles' to the front using a %% component, and have a different listing and display format.
As pages have meaning links, menus and summaries are built automatically removing link spaghetti and allowing site builders to concentrate on content knowing Notanant links everything together. This gives complete flexibility, meaning that sites are not locked into a template, but the entire site look can change later without rebuilding the content.
Always editable with wide use of components
The whole site is editable and changeable. It's one of our design principles. This makes site management and updating extremely easy. And with increasing numbers of features allows different elements such as shops, members, different languages etc to be added when required as the site grows.
Many of our sites start small with 5-10 pages because that's all other sites say they need. Many of these sites have quickly developed into sites with 100+ pages simply because it is easy and natural to do.
Built with people and communities in mind
By linking the content management to community management means people and users are deeply built in to the way Notanant works, whether as visitors, users, editors, administrators or friends. This means access permission control over content, or member-to-member communications, or privacy issues and issues of approving content are built-in from the foundations.
For instance calendars both convey information, but also allow people to sign up. News is recognised as news and can be captured automatically on the front page through our widget/components.
In Notanant, thinking of sites and the way sites connect with people is not the same as thinking as sites as pages. By thinking of sites as something connecting users we get something more powerful and useable, without compromising on accessibility and making it easy for people to use.
