In the early days of the web most sites consisted of a handful
of HTML pages. For smaller sites, it made sense for webmasters
to use programs like Microsoft Front Page and Macromedia (now
Adobe Dreamweaver) to edit their site templates, which usually
contained the navigation, header and footer (the "shell" of
the site), and individual pages.
The problems? * Messy code
These so-called What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG)
editors didn't always get the code right. Webmasters
almost always had to get into the back-end and tweak the
HTML source code. This took time. * Tedious site updates
Edits to a site template meant every page had to be
updated and reuploaded to the web server. This took time
and used resources - especially before the days of broadband. * Painstaking SEO
Optimizing for search engines meant going through every
page and manually making sure your H1 (header) and Title
tags were well optimized. * Risk of data loss
Forgetting to download the most recent version of a site
when working with multiple site editors or from multiple
locations made it easy for editors to overwrite site
updates - sometimes losing hundreds of hours of work with
one ill-advised click of the "upload" button. While Adobe Dreamweaver has certainly come a long way over the
years (messy code is no longer a major problem) and uploading an
entire site to your web server doesn't take all day anymore
thanks to broadband, the other problems and annoyances still
persist when working with a straight HTML site. Enter the Content Management System (CMS). Content Management Systems do what they sound like - they help
you manage your content. Essentially, a CMS allows you to
create/edit/delete your site pages without getting into the
coding side of things. For larger sites, they also make
organization easier. The content is largely stored in a site
database, which lives on a web server, alleviating the need to
back up hundreds of HTML files (if your site is that big).
Ecommerce websites, for example, use content management systems
99% of the time. Blogs use them too. While they may sound expensive and complicated, there are
several full-featured content management systems available for
free. Among the most notable are WordPress (http://wordpress.org/)
and Drupal (http://drupal.org/). Both systems are free to
download/install at your web server, and both have been
developed by an open source community with ease of installation
and use in mind. If you're considering moving your own site to a CMS or building
a new site with one but aren't yet sure of the benefits, here's
a quick list:
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Mike Tekula is the president of Unstuck Digital, a Web Design
and Search Marketing (http://www.unstuckdigital.com/) agency
located in Long Island, NY. UnstuckDigital.com
(http://www.unstuckdigital.com/) runs on WordPress.
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