What is a CMS and why would I want one?

What is a CMS?

CMS stands for Content Management System, basically it’s software that allows you to manage your website without any technical knowledge. If you had a CMS on your website you would have a special part of the site where you could login and change text or add images as easily as if you were writing emails.

A couple of good reasons why you might want a CMS include:

  • Save money over time not paying a web designer to handle changes to your site.
  • Keep your content fresh by making frequent changes easily thereby encouraging repeat visits.

To learn more about content management systems see our article 5 Advantages of a Content Management System

The Ultimate Web Publishing Platform

The best web publishing platform is...

For years I experimented with various web publishing platforms to varying degrees of satisfaction. The ultimate, in my opinion, has to have several important elements.

  1. Easy to use admin interface: this is critical, for a web publishing platform to be successful it has to empower the website administrator, making it easy to add and maintain content quickly and easily.
  2. Extensibility: the system should be able to add new functionality and features as needed, relatively inexpensively and quickly.
  3. Easy to use templates: the look and feel of the site needs to be easily customized, so the templating engine should be easy to work with.

For awhile I used Drupal as my web publishing platform of choice to create a number of websites and it works pretty good. But I found that adding functionality to Drupal beyond what it was designed to do out of the box, was quite difficult. Also, the Drupal admin interface was difficult for some people to come to grips with, making it difficult for me to recommend it to my clients with limited technology experience.

Then I started experimenting with WordPress and have had fantastic success. WordPress makes it so easy to keep a website up to date that people are more likely to add new content. The admin interface is very simple and easy, I have no reservations about introducing the most computer illiterate users to the WordPress admin interface, it’s that easy. Additional functionality can be easily added to a WordPress site and I have been able to quickly and easily customize a website’s look and feel because the templating system is very easy to work with.

The number one thing you can do to make a website more successful is to add more content. More content means more things for people to look at and read, more reasons for people to link to your site, more pages for search engines to index and link to, more reasons people to return to your site. So an easy to use web publishing platform encourages more and better content by making it very easy to add and edit content.

Call and talk with us about making your web site more successful by adding WordPress.