Content Management Systems and Your Website
For the uninitiated, a Content Management System or CMS in short is an interactive way to manage your website content. It can make editing or updating your website nearly as easy as writing a letter in Word.
Of course, if you have a small static website running into less than 10 pages that you hardly need to update more than once or twice a year, you may not even need a CMS. But if you have content that needs to be updated often, dynamic content like news or a blog, or a site that might need to keep growing with your needs you are a good candidate for a CMS.
Okay, so you have decided to use a CMS. Now what? You google for CMS and are buried under thousands of CMSs - paid, open source, blog based, photo gallery based, portals... CMSs needing databases or flatfile systems... Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, Modx... the list is almost endless adding to the confusion.
Ask yourself what you need in your website now and what are the features you might be needing within the next couple of years as your site grows. Do not try to fit in everything as it might make the site too complicated. Go for simplicity in the CMS, since the idea is to try and manage the site yourself, but if your needs are cmoplex and you have an in-house IT savvy team, by all means go ahead and implement an all in one solution.
Make a list of the features you need. These could be:
- A CMS with a WYSIWYG Editor (giving you flexibility to style your text like a Word file).
- Photo Gallery to showcase your products, events etc.
- Blog / News, either or both of these to keep your site updated with the latest happenings or yourviewpoints.
- Polls, FAQs and other gimmicks etc.
- SEO Friendly URLs (instead of the link showing *.php? somewhere in the middle)
- Do you need a Single User editable or Multiple User site?
- Ease of editing or updating the site without much external intervention.