CFDJ: How steep is the learning curve for your customers? We realize you are working to make things easily functional for less technical users. But on the other hand, what would the more technical user think of your software?

KL: The Hot Banana learning curve is less than two hours for the content author marketing user. This has always been one of our benchmark tests. A Web Content Management system has to be simple to use, especially for non-technical marketers. Our users like our interface, it’s to understand, the controls and settings are straight forward and they know how to launch campaigns, emails and manage content.

For administrators and super users, usually a half or full day of training is required, depending upon the user’s prior knowledge of WCM and Web site publishing.

On a technical level, we provide designer and developer training, which can vary from a few hours, if they have an intermediate or higher ColdFusion developer on staff. Again our product development philosophy is to make Hot Banana easy to understand and we think standard object oriented programming practices help to make the learning curve easier.

CFDJ: Look just a little bit into the crystal ball and please tell us, what is the future of optimized search over the next two years? Is this one of the more important topics in the software industry? Will it "disappear" into systems and become an assumed capability of all CMSs?

KL: I believe that SEO will become an assumed piece of functionality that every CMS will have to provide. Down the road, WCM and SEO will become more integrated and automated. WCM, for example, will be able to identify specific SEO targeted copy or content at the page level, and it will automatically pick the related links and manage the ongoing SEO requirements of the page. To do this the WCM system will need to understand the relationships and interdependencies of content with other content around the site.