Almost every client I have dealt with over the past few years has asked for either a simple way to update portions, or all, of their site without knowing html, or have asked specifically for a “Content Management System”. Of course “ways to update your site without knowing html” are all a type of content management system but not all content management systems are “ways to update your site without knowing html”.
There are a few really important questions you will want to ask before you evaluate management systems:
- How often is your content apt to change?
- What content will change? For instance news, press releases and events are prime categories. Products and product information will need updating if you have a shopping cart.
- How many people are apt to be adding content and what are their existing computer skills?
- Do you need to have the ability to revert to a previous version or track when and who made changes?
No matter what system you finally decide upon remember that no CMS is a substitute for a good web administrator. Besides, content management systems are designed to allow you to swap out or add content not alter the design. If your business is fairly large you will probably want one or several people on staff to deal with technical issues and to make design or coding related changes. If you want a polished professional presence you will want a copywriter or content editor who specializes in content for the web and, honestly, perhaps a few more staff members depending on your needs. If your business is smaller it is a good idea to retain your web firm or developer on an ongoing basis to perform those specialized functions.
If you are a very small business and have neither the time or the skills it may be best to simply leave the content updating to your web developer as well - especially if the number of updates you are likely to need are few in number and the rate charged for updates would be far less over a several year period than implementing content management.
Even the easiest content management systems to use can produce unexpected results upon occasion. If you have ever wondered why your margins or formatting went all strange in Word - believe me it doesn’t get better in a CMS.
- Always make sure you receive sufficient documentation or training.
Two to consider:
Two excellent content management systems are WordPress and Joomla. WordPress is a good, easy to use content management system that, depending on your need and desire for customization can be used “out of the box” or be highly customized. There have been a number of plugins created for WordPress including calendars, galleries and more. WordPress is essentially blog software and therefore requires a developer who knows their way around it to customize it so that it will function as a simple CMS. Once that is completed it is one of the easiest ways to manage website content out there.
Joomla (like its also recommended and related product Mambo) is a full featured, enterprise ready Content Management system that allows a number of Extensions. This is the one to use if you want to have registered users, varying levels of access rights, sell products, reservations and more.
Both Joomla and WordPress are free but the implementation won’t be. It takes time and skill to install and customize any of these solutions. The upside is that to obtain even half of the functionality from scratch would cost many thousands of dollars.
web.erratica is built using WordPress. As of this writing minimal customization has been done to an existing template. I uploaded a photoshopped version of a flower from my garden, chose specific widgets (the sidebar elements) and was up and running.
You can view Joomla in action here. The installation is the default with a few minor changes. I will link to a more customized version soon.
