As someone who works as a Web Designer/Web Programmer I have often come up against a common dilemma with people wanting to update their websites.
Most companies want the option of updating their website as soon as they think of something, yet they don’t want to learn HTML code.
This leads to one of two results:
- Send all updates to the web designer who will charge you each time to do something that likely takes them very little time.
- Try to figure out the HTML and FTP stuff so you can save the money – but wind up messing up the navigation or something else. Or at least wasting a greater portion of your time.
Neither of these is particularly desirable which is where content management comes into play. If you want to frequently update content but do it without messing up the HTML, CMS systems work well to isolate only the parts that you want to edit (think of it like making a blog posting, where you have no access to the navigation or other important structure HTML).
There are two things I have used recently which are decent, free (or cheap) CMS providers. There are many others but I want to highlight these two to show what exactly they do:
SquareSpace : A website builder all done in clean, easy-to-understand menus. It is easy to add navigation, disable and enable pages, and add content. Really neat thing is the way in which you can quickly configure different types of pages (galleries, forms, journals). Downside is that there are only a few templates and you need to have a basic understanding of CSS to really configure the changes to these designs.
CushyCMS: This is something that only allows you to change text in your body copy. Once your designer marks what is editable and what isn’t, this program allows you to go to a webpage and modify the content you need. The downside is that if you need to get in and change something that is not marked as editable, you will need to call your web designer to put in new code… which will take as long as making the change would have on its own.
There are many, many other systems out there, in fact I have worked with a couple of them, but the flexibility they allow can be a perfect fit for both client and webmaster. It just depends on which system is the best for your company.
So next time you do a redesign, think about whether you want more access to refreshing your content. It may take more time up front to design the site for CMS – but it may pay off if you update enough.
