A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to create, manage, store and edit content without any HTML programming knowledge. You are able to edit your content from any computer with an Internet connection, and because of this you no longer have to rely on third-party developers or companies to help keep your website up-to-date. This will help reduce costs and increase productivity. The need to update websites faster to keep content fresh has been ever growing. Business owners want their Web designer to update their website faster, and content management systems have played an important role on the Web. Why should this matter to you? While content management systems may seem complex, their entire purpose is to streamline your companies workflow and make your life easier.
1. What Is A Content Management System?
It is a Web-based solution that makes it easy for a company to manage website updates internally. For many companies, updating a website is not something to look forward to because it can be a lengthy and, over time an expensive process. Some companies search for easier means of accomplishing their goals. The solution that many large and small companies have found is a CMS. The easy-to-use application allows your company to control its online identity with little to no knowledge of Web development.
Do I Need a Content Management System?
You know your business better than anyone else, and if you answer Yes to any of the following questions, your company could benefit from using a CMS-based website.
- Does your company update its website content often?
- Does your website contain more than 10 pages?
- Do your company constantly outsource simple website updates to third parties?
Building your website with a CMS may not save you money up front, but if you need to be able to manage your own content in a timely manner, you will definitely be cutting costs in future. You will increase your organization’s speed while reducing its effort. With a CMS accessible from any computer with just an Internet connection, you can speed up the process of approving, publishing, and updating.
CMS has built-in organizational features, which makes content is easier to find and nearly impossible to lose (unless it is deleted by accident). You won't have to spend a lot of time on simple tasks or duplicating your efforts. All of your content is created, managed, published and edited from a single location with very simple, easy-to-use tools. Using these tools requires very little training, which means you can start managing your content almost immediately. If you have identified your business goals and recognized that your website will play a role in them, you should begin the process of implementing your own CMS. There is no set list of requirements for a content management system because each company has unique needs. Keep your requirements to a minimum, but allow for the future growth and demands of your company.
2. Essentials Of A CMS
Three key elements that every CMS has, are templates, content and meta data. Having an understanding of how these three elements interact with the other CMS features is important. Templates are the graphic wrapper of your website and without the actual content, you would have no need for a website. Meta data helps with search engine optimization.
Templates control how your content looks on the page and are extremely helpful when you have to produce 10+ pages. A template is a graphic wrapper that for the most part look the same on every page of the website, regardless of the content. It makes your website’s look and feel consistent. When you want to change the template (say, the color or an image), you would only have to make the change only once and it will be reflected on every page of your website.
Content is created, managed and edited independent of all other CMS elements. Content could be anything from the text on your “Home” page to the photo on your company press release. All content is normally managed through a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) that also has integrated photo uploading tools. This helps you create new pages on your website, manage and edit existing pages and assign pages to multiple areas without having to copy them.
Meta data plays a key role in search engine optimization (SEO). The wonderful thing about a CMS is that it makes it nearly impossible for you to forget to add this information, thus helping your website’s search and index ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Meta data contains such information as category, publishing date, title, brief description, author and keywords. Meta data automatically adds a title and description to links posted on social media websites such as Facebook that not only saves you from having to retype this information but keeps your content relevant as well. This information can also be pulled by search engines and any other website where your website is listed, so putting some extra thought into writing it is vital.
3. CMS Features And Functions
Content management systems come with many standard features to help you create, manage and edit your content. In addition to these standard features, additional features can be added to the flexible system framework. These additional features are often referred to as add-on modules or plug-ins. CMS are very flexible, you can use it for a simple website with little content or expand the features to support a more complex website with a lot of content.
Standard Features
These features are what make your content management system so extensive and highly flexible. They allow you to publish, edit and organize content and manage members, and they contain a variety of built-in security features.
With these straightforward tools, you can see how easy creating and managing your content is.
Publishing are the in-depth features of a CMS. With no knowledge of HTML programming, users can create, manage and schedule content with ease. These powerful tools help free up time within any company by streamlining the whole process. Any user can create content, set the category (i.e. the section in which it will be published) and then set it as a draft for later review. Once the content is finalized, it can be scheduled to be published, say, ten days from then. The rest of the process is automated. With this feature you can write and complete a week’s worth of articles ahead of time and take a vacation without having to worry about publishing new content, because it will publish itself.
Typography at times cause headaches for writers, especially if the writers are not HTML savvy, but the task is made easier with built-in text editors. With most CMS’, your text can be formatted to produce XHTML-valid typography automatically. This saves you the hassle of hand-coding every piece of content and leaves the coding to the system itself. If you paste disallowed characters, such as curly quotes, bullets or accents, from text editors like Microsoft Word, it will automatically be converted into an HTML-valid equivalent. Another great feature that many CMS’ include is automatic linking that saves you from having to manually link URLs that you add to your content. All of these features are useful because they make your workflow more efficient when you create a lot of content. Also if you prefer to enter your own HTML code every time because you don’t trust the automated process, that option is available as well.
Organization is an important of maintaining a website. With a CMS, all of the content is stored in one place, only once, and is accessible from any location with an Internet connection. Content could be saved in a number of states, such as draft, published and archived. You can keep unfinished and finished content in separate places, with different attributes. This is very handy if you like to write content ahead of time and want to be able to easily find it when it comes time to publish.
Draft: this is basically work in progress and is not visible to the public.
Published: content that is viewable to the public.
Archived: previously published content that is hidden away in a safe place, away from the main navigation. Normally used with blogs.
Member management helps you control all aspects of your website’s users. As an administrator, you have full control over how many people can access your website and how much control they have themselves. This can be extremely useful for a large company, where many people (author, editor, publisher, etc.) are responsible for creating and maintaining content. You control how many hands are in the cookie jar at each stage of the creation process.
Administrator: has complete control over all users and access to all of the website’s administration features.
Editor: can publish and manage their own content including other people’s content, etc.
Author: can publish and manage their own content.
Contributor: can write and manage their own content but may not publish it.
Subscriber: can read content, view and write comments, receive newsletters and so on, but cannot edit anything.
Build-in security give you one less thing to worry about. You don't have to worry about session management, robots trying multiple passwords to hack your account or losing data when processing forms. Most CMS has different session management configurations, so you can set the preferences that fit your security needs.
The built-in “multiple password denial” feature, you can make sure that multiple users cannot access your system simultaneously with the same log-in credentials. You can also automatically lock out users after several incorrect password attempts and allow forms to be submitted only once. This helps prevent loss of data and attempts to hack your system via password.
Additional Features
You can integrate add-on modules, or plug-ins, into your CMS to add value, improve accessibility and increase your website's functionality. Using the right combination of features, you can create a website that fits your business plan and helps your company achieve its goals. The number of additional features that you can add is endless, we will focus on the major ones here.
Company blog functionality helps keep your website fresh and can be a very useful marketing tool. While CMS’ have evolved into complete website solutions, originally they were intended to manage blogs. Most blogs were used as personal diaries or breaking news information. Now adapted for business use, they can be very useful for letting customers and clients know about what’s new and exciting with your company. If your company sells products, you can announce new items or sales.
E-commerce integration makes the user experience on your website very comfortable. Being able to sell products and services from within your website would be ideal for any business. Some companies have seamlessly integrated their e-commerce solution into their CMS. User doesn’t even notice that they are jumping from one platform to another because the look and feel are so consistent.
Discussion forums are a complete community-building solution that helps your website’s visitors exchange ideas. Users can create topics, offer feedback on existing topics and interact with other users. How you choose to use a discussion forum depends entirely on your needs.
Photo galleries are used by millions of people around the world. Online photo sharing is becoming this era’s scrapbooking. With the increase in social media use, people can easily send everyone they know a link to their latest photo gallery. Businesses can use this feature to showcase recent events or feature products. By organizing and displaying photos from within your CMS, you can have all of your content in one location.
Video management helps you organize, edit and distribute video content. You don't have to upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo and then manage them separately. It is as simple as managing content for your website’s pages. You can upload almost any kind of video and share your albums and videos on your website and on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Digg. Most CMS' let you upload multiple files at once (in batch) and automatically create thumbnails. Once videos are in the system, you can track viewer behavior as well as feature content based on popularity.
Multi-language support lets you offer content in multiple countries within a single CMS, it allows visitors to choose their preferred language. Most small companies do not need this feature, it can be helpful. The support features may not actually translate content (and if they do, they won’t do an accurate job), but they do let you feature content in multiple languages, which is extremely useful for corporate websites that operate globally.
RSS feeds are a really simple way to syndicate the content on to your website. With the explosion of RSS readers, which constantly check a user’s favorite websites for new content, RSS feeds have become vital. It does not matter whether you update your website daily or monthly, your readers will be sure never to miss an update. Millions of websites publish RSS feeds on a regular basis, and yours shouldn't be an exception. With people’s attention spans shrinking along with their free time, letting users choose the content they want to read through an RSS feed is helpful.
Newsletters/mailing lists are a very helpful feature, especially if you have a lot of users or want to expand your base. Many mainstream users still do not use an RSS reader, and some of them may prefer to receive your content in their inbox rather than by visiting your website every few days. You can integrate newsletters into your system and set the feature’s functionality. Usually, you will be able to manage subscriptions, create a template, compose the newsletter in a WYSIWYG editor, manage your archive and track open/click results.
Statistics/tracking is an essential feature for all website. To effectively run and market a website, you need to know as much as possible about your visitors. Analyzing whatever data is available prepares you to achieve company goals, focuses your marketing initiatives and converts visitors into regular users. You will have information on how many people visit your website, where they live, what content they view and much more. Its popularity is partly due to the immense amount of information it provides about your visitors for free.
Finding a solution that helps your business achieve its goals is important. Many businesses, large and small, use all kinds of different CMS’ to manage their content.