Easy Web Editing With a Content Management System

Back in the old days of the Internet regular websites cost a small fortune and with the advent of editing software the floodgates of instant web designers flew open. This can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing: Designers wish their designs would stay as they created them, their clients wish they could save money by editing their website themselves. Now enter the era of the happy medium – the age of the Content Management System.

What is a Content Management System?
A Content Management System, or CMS for short, is software that runs on your web host’s server that allows content [images, text, video e.t.c.] to be added with ease. By separating the content side from the coding side the structure of the site is never compromised thus delivering up a happy web designer; while the content is easy to add and remove without needing a web design degree, so happy clients abound.

There are a lot of CMSs out there and so you can actually dabble in their use quite easily. Over the years a few standouts have held their own and carved a position out for themselves as reputable, scalable products. Joomla and Drupal are great choices but the learning curve for non-developers is steep.

Joomla is my CMS of choice because it has delivered over and over again for all the sites I have built in the last several years. There are so many add-ons for Joomla that you can build highly robust sites quite quickly. But the more complex the sites the harder it is to tie up a cohesive look and feel without doing custom coding. But with the price of Joomla being $0 – yes, it is free – the additional coding time still makes it the most cost effective way to build websites that have a lot of growth ahead of them.

So if you need a website that you plan on editing yourself over time then a CMS is the way to go. It will mean that replicating pages over and over again in Frontpage or Dreamweaver will be distant memories, as will the errors and broken links that were a by-product of such practices. A Content Management System will keep your website’s design nice and neat, and one of the nicest features is that you can have a pipeline of content filled on your database ready to be published on the date you specify – no more having to be by your computer to update your website while you are on vacation. Imagine how freeing that is.

If you have ever used a word processor you will be comfortable using Joomla to edit your web pages. The HTML editor’s toolbars look very much like an older version of MS Office and adding images and even video is very straightforward.

When it comes time to redesign your site the beauty of a Content Management System really shines through. No more downloading all those standard HTML pages and uploading a slew of replacements – simply change the template and style sheets and all your content is magically placed into the new layout. Well from a designer’s perspective it’s not that magical, it takes a while to design and implement a new template, but for the website owner and visitors the switch is instantaneous.

Now that you have had a brief overview of why you should choose a Content Management System over the older way of publishing a website, ask for a CMS to be used for your next web project; and when your site is up and running you’ll wonder how you ever put up with updating your website the old way.

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