CMS A TO Z

So what is a Content Management System, and why should I use one?

Well, a content management system can be a lot of different things. At the most basic level, it is a set of tools designed to allow you to create, update, organize and remove content. That might be content on your desktop computer, in your company's intranet, or on your website.

This site fucuses on content management systems that are designed specifically to manage the content on your website. That is, the images, text, music files, products, memberships and any other kinds of information that you want to display on your website. These are CMS systems that are usually web-based, but sometimes (as in the case of Adobe's Contribute) require a software to be installed on your computer (other than a browser).

The most common form of a content management system these days is probably the Blog (short for Web log) and all the tools designed to help one add entries, control the layout, and manage the comments and links related to each entry. But this is a very simple type of CMS. Blog managers tend to be limited to only one type of data (the blog entry), and tend to be very simple in terms of how much control the user has over the layout of the data. On the other hand, if you are just looking for a way to manage your blog, it can often be all that you need.

Most commercial sites, however, will need more than simply a blog manager. they will need a way to manage documents, text for their pages, images related to each page, perhaps ecommerce and member registration functions, FAQs, articles, media files such as pdfs, video or music, and other more specialized functionality specific to their industry. If they have a great deal of data, a content management system could be critical to making sure that their site has the latest information on pricing, product availability, or other time-sensitive data.

So why use a content management system rather than simply building a site with something like DreamWeaver or similar we authoring software? The simple answer is manageability.

The magic of a CMS is that if it is well built, it will keep your data independant of the layout and structure of your site. That means if you add a new pdf for download or change the order of your navigation, or just add a new page.. Your CMS will most likely take care of making the necessary changes to all the pages on your site to reflect the updates as necessary. If you build your site from static HTML pages, adding a new item to your navigation could mean updates to all the pages in your website, which might mean hours of tedious html coding. With a CMS, the change will take a matter of minutes.

So if you plan to make updates to your site's content, it is often a good idea to use a CMS. If you are in the market for a Content Management System, take a look at the CMS List on our home page. I'm certain you'll find something that meets your needs.