If you know all about Content Management Systems (CMS) and would never consider starting a new website unless it was run by CMS software then this article isn’t for you, though you’re welcome to continue reading.
I would like to start by apologizing to the rest of you for sometimes forgetting that not everyone is into trends in website development or server software or other admittedly geeky areas. Please let me make it up to you by explaining what you need to know if you need or want to start a new website for your business.
Why CMS?
Rather than start with an explanation of what is meant by CMS, I want to start by explaining why CMS is good. Actually I want to start with explaining why not using a CMS is bad.
Web pages are made by surrounding the content you see with markup which tells your web browser how to display the content. You’ve probably heard of HTML. It’s the markup language that is used to specify the structure of the web page. When the web was young, web pages were all created one at a time in files where content was intertwined with markup. This made editing difficult. As a consequence, web pages weren’t updated often and when they needed to be changed you required a professional web designer who could find the content and change it without breaking the HTML structural code.
In addition to the HTML which provides the structure to your website – where things go or what things are – your site design also includes things like what colors are used, which fonts are used, how big the fonts are and whether rectangular boxes have rounded corners. This style information also used to be entangled with the code in one big file for each web page. There was/is a better way. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) provide a way to separate structure from style.
The idea behind CMS is to separate the content from the structure. What a great idea. You can change your content without re-inventing your websites design. Or you can change your design while keeping your current content. Structure, style and content are each separated so one can be edited and changed without affecting the others. In general, you can access and edit your content without having to pay a designer – though there is a learning curve with all CMS software and the curve is steeper for some systems than for others.
How CMS Works
You really don’t need to know the details of how CMS works. In fact, there are more than one way to make a CMS. But the basics are that a software program on the web server integrates the content into the structure. It does this dynamically as requests for different web pages are made by the users. The content might be stored in files (with minimal markup) or in a database. The important thing is that the content is not stored with structural markup which creates the look and feel of your website.
CMS software often contains the following features to make changing your website’s look easier:
- Templates, skins or themes which can specify the look of you site and are easily changed (from a user point of view templates, skins and themes are just different names for the same thing – though the developers may be fussy if you call a theme a template). Change from pages with no columns to pages with three columns without affecting your content.
- Plugins (may be called extensions) are small software programs which can be added to your CMS to provide new functions, e.g., the ability to insert videos into your content or to display a Google map based on the address information provided by a registered visitor to your site.
- Widgets or modules are also additional software (often also a plugin or extension) which allows you to place unique content in specific positions on your web pages. An example is a widget which shows the RSS feed from a favorite website in box in the right column of your web pages.
The terminology can be confusing if you are new to this. One CMS developer may refer to templates while another uses the term themes. Plugins (or extensions) overlap in function with widgets (or modules). The important point is that most CMS software provides tools that allow you to add to the original functions and to change the look and feel in a modular approach. Choose only what you need.
Conclusion
Writing static web pages where structure, style and content are mixed together is an inefficient and obsolete approach to making websites. The old way was prone to errors, was difficult to update and maintain and discouraged new content much less dynamic content. CMS gives you choices and allows you to change your mind regarding style and structure without having to start over.
There is still a lot I haven’t explained about CMS. There are different categories of software (blogs, forums, magazine sites, corporate sites, wikis and so on) and many different software packages available for each. But at least you should understand you want a CMS site. No other type of site will do.
