Content Management Systems (CMS) have truly changed the way we develop for the web and correspondingly the performance level you expect from your web solution. But many customers may not be aware of what a CMS is or what the benefits may be. Continue reading for a short primer on what a CMS is and how it affects you as a customer.

Content management is simply that: managing your content, whatever that may be. In the beginning days of web, you needed a custom web developer to maintain your site with much less content than we have today. CMS’s have changed that, and now websites with proper systems in place can manage vast amounts of information with ease.

Common Types

The specific CMS you choose can and should be influenced by the activity you want on your website:

• Blogs – in the text, photo, and video varieties
• Shopping Carts – Online commerce
• Wikis – collaborative information communities; these leverage large user bases to maintain vast amounts of information

Then there are general purpose systems which are more bare in their basic functionality, but offer more flexibility and extensibility to create custom solutions.

Benefits of a Content Management System

Although the benefits of a CMS could go on for miles, here are a few key benefits:

Consistency

Often with hand-coded websites, they feel distraught and different. Someone may change a font on one page, but it doesn’t populate to the others. Maybe your business address changes, and now you must scour every page footer to hope it gets changed.

CMS’s allow for the separation of components. For most, if not all, of our websites for instance, there is only a single footer file. Making this change in one place would populate it to the entire site.

Maintenance

To this day, I’ve never had a web customer who didn’t later request changes or modifications. This is completely normal. A CMS will put the power in the customer’s hands if they so desire and allow them to make the changes themselves. But even if they choose not to, the CMS will allow a web developer to more easily maintain these pages, because it implements stronger structure than raw files.

Reliability

Many sites require features, such as ads, feeds, search, and more. Without a CMS, all of these features must be manually coded per installation. With a CMS, the software is developed by teams and communities with testing procedures, bug reports, and upgrades. The functionality is seen hundreds or thousands of times before it’s even pushed live to your website. So, which would you pick? Custom one-off coding that nobody has verified or knows how it works other than the programmer? Or a properly maintained and reliable solution?

And even if there is custom code that needs to be done, CMS’s have extension framework in place to make the development of custom code even easier. And the best part is, even if that custom code does malfunction, simply disable the extension and the rest of your site will function normally.

Cost Effectiveness

Although not all CMS’s are free, there are some very good ones that are. For the majority of customers, the open source systems will do everything they need and more.

Non-free systems are also excellent options, although it typically results in more variability in your developer’s estimate. These are still cost effective considering the efficiency, reliability, and support you’re getting for your money.

Downsides

There’s always a catch, right? There are some extreme cases were content management systems do not fit the bill. On the low end, one must consider the overhead. If you have a very static, small, infrequently updated website, the overhead that comes with a CMS may not be worth it. In these cases, simple HTML files may be better suited.

On the polar opposite, if a site has incredibly complicated features, or has very heavy traffic, custom code may be required.

These are very rare cases, and the majority of websites will function wonderfully with a nice Content Management System behind the scene.