In the ‘bad old days’ you commissioned a website, agreed the content and then had to pay your website designer when you wanted changes to your content (either via a one-off payment or via a regular maintenance fee). Nowadays lots of clients are avoiding this by insisting that their site be created under a Content Management System (CMS) framework.
CMS sites are easy to create and can free you entirely from a web designer – total emancipation, imagine that!
But are these people freeing themselves from the yoke of tyrannical website designers or unknowingly burdening themselves with a maintenance nightmare?
There’s no doubt about it; CMS is here to stay. Quite simply the lure of being able to change anything about their site without having to pick up the phone or email their webmaster is too great to resist for many business owners. This is not a bad thing, it can liberate the site owner and improves the turnaround time for fixing those minor niggles.
As with all things web-related, there are, however some pretty serious downsides to using CMS too. So, should you go down the CMS route? Let’s discuss the pros and cons.
There are many different CMS frameworks. Some are free and some are not. Does your site need to go to the extra expense of paying, or would one of the free ones be adequate. Generally if your site is going to be viewed by many thousands of visitors simultaneously you should consider one of the frameworks for which you have to pay, they ‘scale’ better.
The main advantage of using CMS is that you have total control of your website content. The main disadvantage is that you have control of your website content. You have to learn how to use the CMS framework (it differs depending upon the supplier chosen). Having learnt how to use the CMS system you are then responsible for all of the changes to the site (or indeed the initial setup of the site). Many people underestimate just how much of their time is going to be taken up by this.
By default, all CMS sites of the same type (using the same framework) look the same. If you want to stand out, you need to have a custom template (or more than one if you want your pages to look different from one another). To do this you need to either spend time learning the skills of a web designer or to involve an actual web designer (again!)
To get more than just plain, vanilla, pages you will need to use plugins of some type (e.g. photo galleries, secure areas or blog comment tools). These can be free or can cost money. You will need to think carefully about which plugins are going to fit in with the overall look and behaviour of your site or you’ll end up with a dog’s dinner.
Most of the most popular CMS frameworks have a very active development and user base (Joomla and WordPress for example). This means that the range of plugins and the level of support is good. However, the public-domain CMS frameworks, being non-commercial, have no dedicated help desk that you can phone if you suddenly find that your site has been ‘disimproved’ by some action that you’ve taken.
The responsibility for your organic placement in the search engine rankings is solely yours. You have elected to become your own SEO expert! There are many, many articles on the internet that can help you here, but expect it to use up a lot of your time and become an obsession!
The picture I’ve painted so far is a rather gloomy one, highlighting just how much time a CMS site will leach out of your life and how you can easily make a mess of your site. It doesn’t have to be this way, here are some suggestions as to how to minimise the burden:
- Get a web designer to design your site and implement the framework for you. They can help you choose which CMS framework to use, do all of the design work (so that your site doesn’t look like all the other CMS sites), choose the plugins and set the basic framework in place for you. As part of their fee they should provide you with rudimentary training as to how you use the framework they have put in place.
- Consider a hybrid site which is partly static and partly CMS. This isn’t an option that works for everyone, but, sometimes, upon reflection, clients realise that they really only need certain areas of their site to be regularly changed (blogs, the home page or the ‘about us’ section for example).
- Get advice from a web developer as to what you can do to ensure that your site doesn’t suffer in the search engine rankings. If you’re taking the advice above, and employing them in the first place, this is something that they should do for free.
- Talk to your business buddies. Find out if their sites are CMS based and learn from their mistakes and successes.
So, should you use a CMS framework on your website?
If you’re happy that the pros outweigh the cons for your organisation then it’s a resounding ‘YES’.
If you’re unsure, ask a web designer for their opinion (this should cost nothing). Ask your business acquaintances if they use CMS and find out how much hassle it is for them.
If you don’t have the time right now, then CMS could still be the way but you may want somebody to set it all up for you so that you have the flexibility later to alter your content.
If you’re totally afraid of the whole thing or don’t want to have anything to do with your site, then you probably want to go down the “traditional” route of fixed content and a fee to change it.