Should you use a Content Management System?

When designing a website, you need to decide who will require access for updates and development. If you are happy to run everything through a technically skilled webmaster, who will be responsible for writing all the code and ensuring compliance with best practice, then a Content Management System (CMS) may not be essential to your business. However, most businesses these days require some degree of flexibility, whether that’s updating news stories, adding blog posts or adding new articles, pages and products.

When various departments or individuals within a business need to have their own input, then you may wish to consider using a CMS as the back-end of your site. A CMS is a software system that simplifies all the design and mark-up languages to create an interface which allows non-specialist staff to author, update and administer the website as necessary. It is usually password protected, so only staff trained on the system can access it. Open source solutions like WordPress and Joomla are free and constantly maintained and updated by a community of enthusiastic developers. They are also extremely powerful and can be easily extended with a range of ‘plugins’ to give you the functionality that your business needs.

Using a CMS ensures each department can take responsibility for its own content, which usually means updates are made more regularly, but as the CMS creates the webpage, it is impossible for them to stray from visual branding guidelines, which are defined by templates or themes added to the CMS. Many systems also offer a ‘Workflow Management’ option, whereby individual content can be checked for house style by a Web Editor before submission.

However, it’s worth nothing that CMS are maintenance tools and mainly content focused. By assigning the correct permissions to authors and administrators, different levels of control can be assigned to individuals so some maybe restricted to content only while other may have full control over product catalogues and pricing information. Whatever the need, most businesses today should be considering some kind of CMS solution as part of their web strategy to ensure ease of updating and future growth.