Bulk Website Deployment System
Gutensite has built a really great system to deploy websites in bulk, using Master Sites that are cloned to create starter content for the new website. This is how your new website had default content when you first got started. Now we've made this tool available to our partners.
We've been working with partners who need to provide websites to a network of clients, e.g. Real Estate Brokers that need websites for hundreds of Real Estate Agents, or Churches that need thousands of websites for all the churches in their denomination, or Design Agencies that need websites for all their clients. So we let our partners build one or more Master Sites that represent all the default authorized content for their agents, and then they provide us with a spreadsheet of new sites (or sign people up one by one from their partner page) and the new websites are automatically filled with all their content.
A website with great and useful content can take weeks to gather and write the content, gather all the assets (images, files, videos, etc), and then put it all together. So by cloning a Master Site, the agents get an instant website that they can begin using immediately, and everyone saves thousands of dollars and a lot of time.
Dynamic Updating of Cloned Sites
But the deployment system was just the beginning. We have now extended the Master Sites to allow dynamic updating of all the sites that were cloned from the Master Site. So the Master Sites are not just content templates anymore, it can actually be a syndication publishing platform.
This is really powerful in a lot of use cases. For example, when a Real Estate Broker creates a Master Site they want to add neighborhood pages for the 40+ different communities they work in. Every agent then gets these neighborhood pages on their website for their visitors to reference (awesome).
But now when the brokerage grows into a new neighborhood, or they want to update photos or stats about a neighborhood, they can update their Master Site, and all the agent websites that were duplicated from that Master Site will get the new content instantly. The Master Site publishes the new content, adds, edits, or deletes content from the syndicated site.
Customizing Cloned Content
The website owner (e.g. the Real Estate Agent) can edit the content if they want to customize it. It's their website and they may wish to inactivate neighborhoods they don't work in, or change the about page, or add their own content. That's totally fine. The Master Site updates will only affect content that hasn't been edited.
As soon as you edit cloned content, you take that page out of the queue for updates. All cloned content is marked as green in the content lists, and has a message at the top of the edit page that indicates that it is syndicated content, so you can tell what was cloned. When you edit it, the green disappears in the list and the edit page lets you know that the content is no longer receiving updates from the Master Site.
But if you change your mind, you can click a button to "Revert to Original Version" and your customizations will be removed and you will again receive the content from the Master Site.
Get Your Own Master Site
If you need a way to bulk create/deploy multiple website from a Master Site, or you need a way to keep multiple websites in sync with the latest content, give us a call and we can tell you more about our partnership program. We can provide reduced bulk rates and all the support you need.