So, you’ve hired a professional web designer to create a website for you, and you’re ready to own a website that looks beautiful and functions smoothly. Congratulations! But what happens when you want to update the text on one or more pages? How about images? What if you want to remove a page, add a page, and shuffle things around? If you want the power to do that yourself, you’ll need a content management system.
In the early days of the Internet, the ability to edit the content on your website would always have been the sole province of your web designer. If you had a large business and a lot of money, you could have your web developers set up a special system to allow you to manage your own content, but such systems were prohibitively expensive and extremely complicated.
Today, however, you can have a content management system that’s much more elegant, cost-effective and easy to use. There are several alternatives, and here we’ll look at the pros and cons of some of the most popular options. We’ll also look at exactly what a content management system is and what it does — and does not do.
Log in as an administrator
How can you edit the text, images and pages of your website without knowing how to write HTML? The most common way is via a control panel set up on the “back end” of your website. This requires your web designer to set up a program on your web server. There are several programs available, but they all share a few things in common: You log in as an administrator of the website, using a special User ID and a password on a login screen; you make changes to your content from within this special control panel; you update the website content by publishing the changes you’ve made somehow from within that control panel.
If you’ve used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, you’ll find that using a Content Management System (or, CMS for short) is similar.
Let’s look at a few of the alternatives that are most popular today:
WordPress as a Content Management System
The most popular CMS alternatives today are written as open source software. Open source software is developed by programmers who, for various reasons, are willing to give their code away for free. That means that there is no licensing fee to pay to use this software, and it also means that other programmers are free to alter the code and customize the applications however they like. Large communities have evolved that develop and support particular programs. More than half the Internet is powered by Apache server software, which is open source software.
One extremely popular open source program is WordPress, which was originally developed to empower people to publish articles on the web known as Weblogs, or Blogs. Part of what WordPress does is allow non-technical users to log in to an administrative control panel and update content, and that’s basically what a CMS does, too. So, today, WordPress has become one of the most popular software engines powering content management systems.
WordPress is fairly simple to use, and also is fairly simple for a web developer to set up and cusomize. For this reason, it’s ideal for small to medium-sized websites. Setting up a CMS with WordPress does require some specific expertise, and a bit of customization, but the end result is a fast-loading, easy-to-manage website for relatively low cost.
Using Drupal and Joomla
Drupal and Joomla are software applications that specialize in content management. Developed specficially as CMSs, these programs are much more robust and are better than WordPress at managing vastly complex websites. They offer more freedom to control where things go on a page, and offer more options for management of websites in general.
However, these and other dedicated CMS programs are also vastly more complicated to set up and customize than WordPress. A designer must spend much more time and energy setting up these programs, which makes them much more expensive for the end user. They also can be a lot more complicated for you to learn how to use to manage your site.
It’s best to use only as much complexity as you really need for your website. Unless your website is hundreds of pages long, or unless you need specific features that you know cannot be delivered without one of these more complex CMS programs, it’s best to stick with something simpler.
Using Adobe Contribute
Yet another approach to managing content on your website is to use a program called Adobe Contribute. This program is not open source, and costs nearly $200 per license. It lives on your own computer, rather than on the web server where your website lives, and it downloads a copy of each web page to your computer as you edit it, then saves it back to the server when you publish your changes.
This program is made to integrate with Dreamweaver, which is the industry standard professional web design program, also currently owned by Adobe.
This approach works fairly well, but to get the most out of it, your web designer must set up your site using proprietary Dreamweaver templates, and you’ll never have quite as much control or flexibility over your website as you would with a server-based CMS such as WordPress or Drupal.
A website managed with Contribute usually will employ simple XHTML and CSS as its architecture, which could make the intitial creation of the site a bit less expensive than it is to set up a CMS on your server. But often the trade-off in control over the site and ease of use isn’t worth the initial savings.
So, as you shop for a website or plan to redesign your site, hopefully you’ll be better informed as to what’s available to empower you to manage the content of your own site without having to become a code jockey.