Is CMS Right for Your Business?
The acronym CMS can mean incredible things for your company. But you have to know what it is. We'll give you a breakdown of what it means, and what it can do for your business. This simple tool can mean the difference between having an up-to-date web presence with topical materials, and having a stale website that doesn't entice anyone. We will take you step by step through what CMS is, how it works, and the way it can change the online face of your business.
What is CMS?
The term CMS is one of those phrases that gets bandied about among the online community, and certainly among website designers and developers, but hardly has made it into the common lingo of business. CMS is web shorthand for Content Management System. It is a program that you load onto the backend of your website (the part that no one sees) and it allows you to make changes to your web pages with a quick, simple, easy interface. CMS is important because it can mean the different between paying a website designer to update your site vs. being able to manage most of your content yourself.
What it Does
CMS is web shorthand for Content Management System. What it means is there is a program already built into the infrastructure of your website that allows you to make changes to it without needing to know any code yourself. You can add pictures, video, and blog content using the CMS. It creates a way for you to add pages, remove pages, and change the content of pages with only a minimum of technical knowledge.
How it Helps Your Website
The simple answer is that yes, you almost certainly want a Content Management System on your website. Otherwise, you end up paying exorbitant fees to a freelancer, or you need to hire and in-house web developer to handle all of your content.
It gives you much greater control. Before CMS systems became popular, anyone that owned a website couldn't make changes without help. They would need to call up their website designer and wait for them to change content, upload files, and do layout maintenance. Not only did this cost money, but there was a turnover time between when you wrote some new piece of information and when it went live on your site. While you might have some beautiful pictures ready for your website sitting on your home computer, it could be days before the designer could put them onto the web page. With CMS, you don't have that wait time. As soon as you click the publish button on your CMS, it is able to be viewed by your visitors.
What CMS Should You Choose?
This is when you will need to talk to a web designer if you have one. Many times website designers will specialize in one kind of CMS. Even if they do not have a single specialty, they will have one that they prefer. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Ruby On Rails, and Pronto are some of the most common. If you are designing it yourself, you need to determine how much time you have to spend on the site, how strong your affinity for programming is, and how powerful you need the site to be.
In the next blog we will explore what kind of Content Management is right for your site. We'll look at some of the big names in CMS as well as some of the young upstarts just coming onto the scene. Whether you have a corporate website, a personal blog, an eCommerce site, or a personal advertisement site, we'll give you a breakdown of where to start when it comes to managing your content.