Quick Take Review: Hot Banana Web Content Management

By John Conroy Mar 26, 2008

2 comments

Hot Banana is a web content management system (Web CMS) with a heavy emphasis placed on web marketing and content optimization, but with a full range of core content management capabilities which attract customers with a broad range of needs.

The CMS is a part of and integrated with the Lyris suite of marketing solutions, most notably with EmailLabs.

The Lyris marketing suite — following a slew of takeovers of top players in core marketing technologie — has now been formally packaged into Lyris HQ, which is comprised of Hot Banana, EmailLabs (email marketing), ClickTracks (analytics), EmailAdvisor (email campaign analysis and toolset) and BidHero (bid-management).

Hot Banana Web CMS

The Lyris HQ Hot Banana product is built to satisfy three core demands: Web Content Management, Web Site optimization, and Marketing Automation. The product is ideal for marketing companies, for SMEs for whom web marketing is an important part of their business but which also require extensive CMS capabilities, and also for organizations which do not fall into either category but for whom ease of use is important. In enterprise terms, the Hot Banana solution is more suited to smaller to medium-size web projects, but numerous such projects can be managed from the interface.

Lyris HQ Hot Banana comes in two flavors: a licensed version and a hosted, browser-based Software as a Service (SaaS) version. Note that the SaaS version retains the full functionality of its licensed stablemate, so the content of this review is equally valid for both versions.

Although originally envisioned as a Web content management system primarily for marketers, an intuitive user interface and strong overall features have attracted numerous customers in non-profits and faith-based organizations — including The Vatican, the Archdiocese of New York, and shelternet.ca, a resource for abused women, education (e.g., www.scdsb.on.ca), government (e.g., www.wasagabeach.com), also tourism (e.g., www.bellind.com), and professional services and technology. Hot Banana also powers the intranets of organizations including Ingersoll-Rand, and another notable recent client is the Bank of Kuwait.

Company History and Origins

Hot Banana was founded in 1999 by a team of web marketing experts who wanted to build a platform which would serve web marketing needs. The organization is based in Ontario, Canada. In August 2006 the company was bought by Lyris, a specialist technology marketing company (then called JL Halsey). Lyris is a public concern with a market cap (as of the review date) of around US$ 100m. This review was conducted on Hot Banana 5.7, SaaS version.

Channel Partners and Overseas Sales Partners

HB have partnered to develop and deliver local expertise, sector knowledge, training and support. Partners are located in Denver and San Francisco, and also in Kuwait, South Africa and NSW, Australia. So needless to say, if you're a European content management sales channel person, and you're twiddling your thumbs at the moment…we can think of a number to ring.

Hot Banana Pricing

Licensed Version:
Hot Banana Pricing - Perpetual

Software as a Service, Browser-based version:
Hot Banana Pricing - SaaS

Lyris HQ Hot Banana Features

Platform Technology

Hot Banana is built with Adobe's ColdFusion technology and the licensed version requires ColdFusion MX application server and MS SQL Server. It runs best with MS IIS and Windows 2000/2003, but being that ColdFusion runs atop a Java server container, Linux/Apache is also supported. The vendor claims that the software can handle 250 page views a minute per server, and up to 50 GBs of traffic per month.

The SaaS version of course does not have any such requirements, and is a straight subscription service.

Hot Banana/Lyris has thrown a few bucks at its SaaS infrastructure lately and it shows — during our lab testing, we found the web-based version to be quite responsive.

We do think that ColdFusion is waning rather more than it's waxing and for that reason, we take a few points back in this area. Additionally, hosting the Microsoft stack with ColdFusion is likely to cost a bit more money than a straight .NET, Java or PHP-based solution, but if you go SaaS, this is not a concern.

Rating: 3/5

Website Optimization

Optimization is of central importance to Hot Banana and considerable resources are dedicated to the tracking of website and campaign performance. SEO tools take central stage in content creation, and advanced keyword analysis reports are reached directly from the content creation and editing interface (below).

Hot Banana Website Optimization Tools

Such analysis is a one-click affair, and a simple matter of entering keywords into a single field. No confusion at all here — you enter the word you want analyzed and hit the big gray button. It's web app usability the way it should be.

'Google Suggest Keywords' is also integrated and displayed with results to help you identify that killer phrase which always slips the net.

Other optimization tools include:

Automatic Google Sitemap updating and submittal
Dedicated metadata management
SEO-friendly output by design
Affiliate tracking
Automated title attributes in hyperlinks
Automatic 301 (permanent) redirects of duplicate pages
Analytics vendors incorporated with automatic page tagging: ClickTracks, Google Analytics, WebTrends and IndexTools are all incorporated into Hot Banana, and if your preferred system is not on that list you can integrate it if it has page tagging and is JavaScript-based.
Automated Tagging
Lead Tracking/Conversion tools: Google Adwords conversions, Yahoo! and MSN conversion tags, WebTrends 8 scenarios and EmailLabs Action Tracking conversion tags are all part of the * Hot Banana Analytics Center
Advanced user tracking: scenario/funnel and path analysis
Conversion tracking
External link analysis and file download tracking

Very high usability allied with considerable optimization power. Rating 5/5

Marketing Automation

In common with site optimization, marketing automation is an important core function of Hot Banana, and one of its key differentiation points over other products in the space.

Marketing Automation Features:

An extensive web form builder is provided to streamline the creation of forms and manage captured data, and such forms can also be managed, edited and reused. Forms can be multi-step, and can contain drop boxes, buttons, short and long text fields, required fields, etc. These forms can be pre-populated with information when the user is coming from an email campaign with personal ID tags attached.