Just What is a CMS?
CMS is an acronym for "Content Management System". This is quite possibly the most important tool you can use to keep your site up to date. This is because it allows a non-technical user to update the site without a technical person having to intervene — and even for those users that are technical it offers a quick and efficient way to update your site.
A CMS has many different flavors with costs ranging from free to really expensive. The CMS that you choose would be dependent upon your needs. Are you managing a small brochure site, but are interested in a more dynamic design? Or are you managing a very large E-Commerce site that needs constant updating by user's that don't necessarily have detailed training? These are two extremes, and we know that most likely you're going to fall in the middle.
The important thing to note here is that if it's difficult to maintain your website, your updates are going to happen less frequently and people will be less inclined to come to your site. A CMS makes it easy for you to change your website quickly and keep it fresh.
What Are the Options?
Here's a list of some of the CMS Applications that we like:
| Company Name | Why We Like It |
|---|---|
| Ektron, Inc. CMS400.NET |
The Ektron CMS has a great user interface for making quick and easy updates to the site. All you have to do is login as a content editor and then navigate the site just as if you were a normal user. Once you find the content that you're looking to update you hover your mouse over it and your options to edit are right there. One more click and you're editing content in an editor similar to Word. It doesn't get much easier. Ektron also has many other features that help you attract users to your site. |
| Joomla | Joomla is an open source CMS. What's great about this is that it's freely available to everyone. It's a very popular CMS for not only this reason, but for its stability and rich feature set. There are also many extensions for Joomla that we can plug in for you. Things like ECommerce, blogs, news feeds, photo galleries and a lot more. |
| Wordpress | The Wordpress platform is right about the most popular Blogging Engine/Content Management System available today. They state that "WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time." We don't disagree with this claim at all. It is an incredibly easy to use software. In fact, we don't even suggest building static sites and instead suggest implementing Wordpress in its place. |
| Telligent Graffiti CMS |
Telligent makes a product called "Graffiti CMS". It's a CMS that allows you to easily add new content and new pages in the form of "posts". It also has a rich administrative interface and is "skinnable", which means that we can take the base CMS install and make it fit a design that you choose. |
Of course there are many other options available for a CMS and we keep on top of all the latest ones. What works best for you depends on just what type of features make sense for you and your site. We are happy to wade through all of the different types that are out there and pick a solution that will best suit your needs.