About Us - orbcms.com

About Us

ORB-CMS is a small Southampton based business that specialises in delivering high quality web solutions without the hefty price tags that are common in the market place.

What is ORB-CMS?

ORB is our custom content management system (CMS) which is a system that powers websites. How it works and what it can do we go into more detail in the rest of our website but in the most basic terms it allows our customers to have both simple and very powerful multi-functional websites, and just about everything in between. It lets non-technical users manage and update their website content without learning any HTML or programming.

So, ORB-CMS designs and makes websites that utilize a CMS system which makes it easy for non-technical people to manage the content of their website, but there’s much more to us than that, to get an idea of what we do, consider the following (which we don’t do):

What would happen if every time a builder constructed a house he charged his customer for making a kiln to make the bricks, your plumber charged you for opening a copper mine to smelt the ore to make your water pipes, or you were charged for a building a new reservoir to supply your mains water?

Ridiculous – of course it is? But, that’s not too dissimilar from what website providers have been doing for years.

Sure, the physical design will vary from client to client, but each time they build a new website they charge the client for writing all the code from scratch for every function that they include, even though much of the code is identical to what they may have written only the week before for another website. And, additional features are often treated as ‘bespoke’ which means the client ends up paying additional charges. Furthermore, without CMS, they will go on charging you a high fee every time they add or make changes to your site. The few that do offer low cost CMS solutions normally charge for more than a certain low number of pages, even though in CMS terms it makes no difference weather the customer has 10 or 10000 pages because they make and manage them.

That’s why it is not uncommon for clients to be charged thousands of pounds for having a website built.

But ORB-CMS have developed a modular system where just about any special feature that can be used in a webpage (and we have over 60 such features so far) can be easily ‘bolted on’ to your site so that it can be customized to suite your particular requirements, at very little extra cost, and if you decide to use one of our ready made website packages then the key functions will already have been included.

Who we are

ORB-CMS, part of the Trisidian Group, was conceived in 2006, the brainchild of James Hughes, the CEO and Development Director. He was joined in 2007 by co-director Ed Barnes.

James Hughes - Lead Developer

James, an innovator by nature, has always been quick to recognize the advantages that new technologies offer. He has been building websites for over eight years and at en early stage saw the potential for employing a module-based approach to building web sites using a set of pre-built ‘codes’, with each module being compatible with the other. He says “The saving in time achieved by not having to write all the codes for each function when constructing a new website should be passed on to the client. This frees up time and resources that can then be spent on the content and design and search engine optimization, rather than getting bogged-down in the technicalities. And, employing CMS so that clients can update or change the content of their web pages themselves empowers customers to drive growth on their websites”.

We have become increasingly frustrated that despite the rapid advancement in the development of web tools in recent years, the advantages are not being passed on to the end user. Web designers continue to charge clients very high fees for building and servicing web sites that are today often considered to be relatively straightforward. The high costs associated with building a website either precluded smaller businesses from having one, or if they did, then corners were cut with the result that the website was poorly designed or lacked adequate functionality to attract visitors.

Ed, who for many years held directorships in several international organisations and worked both in the UK and overseas, brought more than 35 years experience of design, copyrighting, marketing and business skills to the group. Ed, also an ‘ideas man’, was working on several new web initiatives of his own when he was introduced to James through a mutual friend. Ed was quick to recognize the gap in the market that the ORB system was designed for and the enormous benefits it offered for every start-up business and existing organisation no matter what their size.

James and Ed are assisted by a team with many years experience in web work, including computer programming, graphic design, copy editing and marketing.

Our Solution

ORB-CMS offers very affordable solutions for the very smallest of organizations, and powerful sites for larger businesses including corporate groups and local government. ORB-CMS has developed powerful web-building software in a modular format, so clients can start with a basic site and simply add the modules that are required. Whenever extra functions are needed a new module can be ‘bolted-on’ – it’s not written from scratch each time. We re-cycle!

You don’t pay for ‘building the brick kiln’ every time you want a new brick!

The module that turns a simple website into an e-commerce site, for instance, is pretty much the same whether it’s used for a small ‘shop’ selling one product, or a large site selling hundreds of different products. It’s all a matter of scale so we DON’T charge for writing all the application code every time.

ORB-CMS continues to add new and improve functions, and because the applications are hosted on our servers, you will automatically benefit from the very latest up-dates to the applications. Yes that’s right – you get free upgrades for life. Orb is not just a company that sells websites, we sell leases of web systems so you are never left with a site that you can't update or a system that is obsolete.