If you’re like most people, the hefty phrase “Content Management System” evokes unpleasant memories of some long-forgotten high school biology class. In my opinion, biology takes the cake with similar compound phrases like Nodes of Ranvier and Okazaki fragments.
A Content Management System – or “CMS” for short – turns out to be far less intimidating.
The Dilemma
Websites are complicated things, even for people who make a living designing and building them. Imagine (if you need to) that you’re a small business owner looking to create a web presence. You understand that “if people can’t find you on Google, you might as well not exist.”
What you don’t understand is how to build a website. If you do, you probably don’t have the time or the desire. And if you have the time and desire, you won’t when your business takes off. Trust me: when it comes down to “Do I work on making my customers happy or do I load up my HTML editor to change this sentence”, you’re going to make your customers happy.
And there is a good chance your website will suffer.
It may fall by the wayside, neglected, and those once shining sentences, so wonderfully up-to-date and relevant, may cease to be.
There’s more than one way to build a website
There are essentially two ways to build and maintain a website: using static HTML or a CMS.
Static HTML: The old, hard-to-update way
A static HTML site is just that: static. It only changes when you (or your developer) changes the actual HTML code, either by hand or by using an HTML editor like Dreamweaver. To maintain a static HTML site, you have to be familiar with HTML, an HTML editor, and (more often than not) FTP software that allows you to move your website files from your computer to your web server. That’s a lot of technical expertise!
The trouble with this method is that many business owners simply don’t have the time to learn HTML. What’s more, HTML editors can be expensive, and configuring an FTP program to talk to a web server is downright impossible for many people.
What ends up happening is one of two things:
- The business owner neglects the website, since it’s just too much trouble to update
- The business owner decides to maintain the website, and ends up calling the web developer every time a change is needed
Over time, #2 can get to be expensive. It often discourages small businesses from keeping up their website, since they have to weigh the pros of modifying a sentence to the cons of paying an hourly rate for the work.
CMS: No HTML required
To address these issues, some enterprising coders decided to create an alternative solution, one that allows people to maintain their websites with little or no knowledge of HTML.
A Content Management System (CMS) is a web-based tool that lets users edit a website with little or no knowledge of HTML.
The typical CMS looks a lot like a word processing program. For most, this makes using a CMS a short leap from working with a document in, say, Microsoft Word.
Below is a screenshot of me editing this very post in WordPress, the CMS that powers this blog. Notice how intuitive the layout is. See the familiar icons for bold, italic, and underline?
Screenshot of WordPress, a popular content management system
Instead of having to know the HTML commands for making text bold, you can click a button. With a CMS, making changes to a page on your site is as easy as editing a Word document.
Content Management Systems: A Primer
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s go a little deeper. A CMS can be a very powerful tool, allowing you to:
- Add new content (be it a blog post or a web page)
- Delete old content
- Organize your content
- Gather statistics
- Give other users access to your site (and control what they can do)
If you want to add a new web page to a static HTML website, you do one of two things:
- Ask your web developer to do it. This requires that you wait until he has the time, and also that you pay an hourly rate.
- Do it yourself. You have to create a new page, find the spot in the page you want to change, make the change, and upload the changes.
If you want to add a new web page to a site running on a CMS, you click a button. Instant gratification, and–best of all–gratis.
A real world example
Let’s take a large website, like MSNBC. They use a CMS. They have to! Can you imagine having to go through the create/edit/upload process every time you wanted to post a news story? It would take forever! Instead, their editors probably just click “Write”, type the story, and click “Publish.”
I do the same thing on a smaller scale. It would be silly for me to have to fire up my HTML editor, type up the content of my latest post, and upload it. Instead, I click “Write” from my CMS, and I’m set:
Screenshot of the WordPress Write screen
Deleting content is also much easier with a CMS. In WordPress’ case, I simply find the blog post I want to delete, and click:
Screenshot of the WordPress Management screen, showing how to delete content
This functionality is not unique to WordPress, but is a characteristic of all CMSs. The screenshot above also shows how content is organized in a meaningful way. At a glance, you can tell what content you have, when it was created, what it’s called, and who wrote it.
Why doesn’t everyone have a CMS?
While a CMS makes life much easier once your site is live, it needs to be set up first. Chances are you’ll need a web developer to do the footwork, which involves:
- Downloading and installing the CMS on your web server
- Creating and configuring a database
- Integrating your website with the CMS
Developers tend to charge more up front for a CMS than they do for a static HTML site, for the simple reason that it requires more work to configure.
A CMS has higher up-front costs, but tends to pay for itself in the long run.
One of the nice things about a CMS is that, if you’re not concerned about having a unique design for your site, you can just use the pre-installed default theme:
The 3 Roads Media blog with the default WordPress theme
Conclusion
A CMS makes it easy to maintain your website. Even if you have zero knowledge of HTML, you can easily add, edit, and remove content (text, images, videos, etc.) from your site.
Because it’s so easy to make changes, CMS-driven sites tend to be more current than their static counterparts. Although a CMS typically has higher up-front costs, its lower long-term costs more than offset the initial expense.
Post a Comment