Website Builders

What is Content Management

If you are a website owner, you must have at one point in time or another wished you could make an immediate change to your website instead of having to send your corrections to your website designer and wait until he had the time to do it for you and charge you a fee for his time and effort.

Actually, you can – with a Content Management System (CMS). Content management systems are specialised and sophisticated software systems designed to enable you to create your site and then input your content, organise, manage, modify, edit and publish your website – usually from within your Internet browser.

Content Management Systems differ from website builders in that with the latter, you need to visit the website builder program or load the website builder software to modify your site, while with the CMS, the website builder and your website are integrated together as a unit..

In practice, this means you can manage your website at any time, and from anywhere in the world where you have access to a computer and an internet connection irrespective of the software platform. It opens up tremendous possibilities and opportunities for you.

Content Management systems originated in the publishing world as the industry grew and these companies needed to organise and manage hundreds of thousands of documents quickly and consistently on a daily basis.

As the Internet has generated millions of electronic articles and documents, large firms developed and modified this technology for their use. Fortunately, what used to be very complex and expensive systems have now filtered down to smaller firms and become much less complex so that you can pick up a CMS for a fraction of what it cost before.

Features of Content Managed Systems

Pros of Content Managed Systems

These are too numerous to list here – but include:

• The ability to edit your website pages anywhere, any time
• Separation of structure and content.
• Multiple levels of access for editing and publishing.
• Built in Search Engine Optimisation.
• Ability to modify the style and appearance of your site very easily.
• Modular structure giving you the ability to customise your site with various plug-ins and tools.
• Ability to organise and restructure your website with switchable templates and movable sections.
• In-built ability to easily organise and maintain thousands of pages of articles and data.

Cons of Content Managed Systems

• Content Managed Systems can be quite complex and can take quite a while to understand, even if you are familiar with computers.
• The restrictions and different levels of access need to be well managed otherwise unauthorised persons can cause system damage, or loss of information or data theft. Basically give the people in your organisation only enough access to do what they need to do.

Free Content Management Systems (Open Source)

These include

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Mambo
• Plone

Professional Content Management Systems

• EasyCMS