Content Management Systems (CMS) PDF Print E-mail

You are clicking on this page for one of three likely reasons.

 

     1.     You spoke to someone here on the phone that just told you to or emailed you this link.

 

     2.     You have never heard of Content Management and are afraid you should know what it is.

 

     3.     You know exactly what you want in your website and have come to the right place. 


Ok, so if you are one of the first two, this is the 30 second version. A CMS is a tool used to build a website that keeps the HTML, CSS, and Content of the website all completely seperated from each other until the page loads for the browser when the site is visited. Kind of like using your grandma's recipe for spagetti and cooking the meat, noodles, and sauce all completely seperate until dinner is served instead of buying (or building in our application) all in pre-cooked, pre-packages, pre-mixed cans. If you are cooking for 25 people and wanted to change the meat in Chef Boyardi, it would be a huge pain, however in grandma's recipe, you could easily change the recipe to use Italian sausage rather than seasoned beef the day before people come over. The same applies in web development. Using Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or other desktop based editors build the style, layout, and content into one file and some even save each page as a seperate file. Therefore if get tired of the same old design, it typically means a complete redo on the whole website.

 

A good CMS systems allows a novice user (with a little training) the ability to:

 

  •      Publish, edit, and delete pages

  •      Publish, edit, and delete navigation links

  •      Publish, edit, and photos, videos, pdf's, and other files

  •      Allow the user to do all of this and not need to know any HMTL programming


This is all fine and good, but my main reason for using them is that they are very search engine friendly and if you want to redesign the siite every two years (I recommend this) you can do so without loosing your existing content, meta tags, titles, links, urls, and most importantly your search engine rankings.