I haven’t posted here for a while because I’ve been working on a project called GetSimple. GetSimple is an XML based lite Content Management System. To go along with it’s best-in-class user interface, we have loaded it with features that every website needs, but with nothing it doesn’t. GetSimple is truly the simplest way to manage a small-business website.

Check out the site, download it and check it out! It’s taken 7 months of work to get to this point, and I’m extremely proud of it.

Main Features

1. Fast as XML
   We don’t use mySQL to store our information, but instead depend on the speed and accuracy of XML. By utilizing XML, we are able stay away from introducing an extra layer of slowness and complexity associated with connecting to a mySQL database. Because GetSimple was built specifically for the small-site market, we feel this is the absolutely best option for data storage.

2. You can “Undo” Almost Everything
   This feature was based off an eye-opening AListApart article explaining how warning messages never work as planned. Because of this, we’ve included “undo” into almost every action you can take on the site, giving you peace-of-mind for when you make those inevitable stupid mistakes.

3. Easy to Learn UI
   The top priority when designing our user-interface was to make it the best in it’s class. We had the luxury of trying and testing all the competing management systems before designing ours, so we took the best out of each one – then refined it.

4. Simple Installation
   The total time in setting up a website took a total of 5 minutes, from starting the FTP to finishing the setup procedure.

5. Simple Theme Customization
   We have a codex that shows which functions are available for theme customization. Our goal was not to bloat our software with hundreds of little-used theme functions, but to offer more than enough to allow for a fully customized theme.

6. Designed For the Small-Site Market
   This is one of the reasons GetSimple uses XML rather than a robust database such as mySQL. For most small businesses, their only real need is to be able to easily update their site without the need of a ton of extraneous rarely used features. GetSimple’s goal is to manage small websites efficiently and effectively.

The topic is appropriate for this time of year. This is my first tax season with the new business and when I officially started Cagintranet in September, I had no idea what I was getting into.

Right off the bat, I knew I needed an application to help keep do my invoices in a professional manner that also was able to generate some minor reports come tax time. I first looked at the free version of Blinksale which looked like an amazing online tool. It was, but I quickly found that I needed something more robust in terms of reporting, something that even their paid versions lacked.

Having a budget of closer to $0 doesn’t help in my search either. After Blinksale, I looked at:

• The Invoice Machine and Excel – Umm, even worse tracking than Blinksale but at least I could crunch numbers (read: manual reporting) in Excel.
• Freshbooks – I didn’t even get past the first stage of the sign up because of the limitation of only 3 active clients for their free version. $14 wasn’t a bad step up for the paid version – but I wanted to wait to see if I could find anything cheaper.
• Old Reliable Quickbooks…

Quickbooks

I briefly skirted with the idea of downloading a pirated version of Quickbooks from Bittorrent. After being able to not find a version newer than 2006 on there, I decided to take a look at how much the software would actually cost if I was going to hypothetically buy it. I was a real business after all, right?

After gasping at the prices of the many different packages of Quickbooks ($199.95 and up), I found a small link on their product page for a free version of Simple Start.

Assuming that it was cripleware, I took a look at it’s feature list. I fully expected it to be able to create invoices but not save them or be able to handle only 3 clients, but I am pleasantly surprised. It does just about everything but download bank and credit card information – which I don’t plan on using right now anyway.

So anyway, I downloaded it almost immediately, and I haven’t looked back. It has done everything my very small business has asked of it, and probably could do more, but I haven’t even begun to look at it all yet.