website content management systems

What is a content management system?

We are often asked 'What is a Content Management System?'

Quite simply it is a software tool or platform that can be used by non-technical people to manage the content of a website in-house.

Content Management Systems (CMS) were developed to enable website management without the need for highly experienced and expensive technical personnel to be involved in the process of low-level content updates. A Content Management System (CMS) contains structured documents referred to as 'templates', these templates form the layout of the website and the structure (the layout 'coding' for the website page) is hidden from the editor, allowing them to amend the content only, leaving the structure intact.

However there are several disadvantages to having a content management system that you must consider:What is a content management system?

  1. When a website incorporates Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) we do not recommended that you allow unskilled staff to amend the content of your website. This could prove detrimental to your SEO efforts as something as simple as changing an image or heading may also change coding or links that could negatively impact your SEO, resulting in a lower position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
  2. Content management systems produce bulky code and are constructed similar to a database which can lead to excessive page speed and a negative impact on user experiance. All CMS require you to download and install several add-ons and extensions along the way for added features including SEO, image galleries and forms. These add-ons and extensions can conflict with each other and have limited usability resulting in many hours wasted just trying to get a website to function right.
  3. Content management systems are not as simple as people would have you believe, they will require time and effort to familiarise yourself and staff to the inner working of all the options.
  4. Content management systems don't actually save you any money! This is the main reason companies want a CMS, but if you actually calculate the time and effort cost of learning the systems, implementing changes and possibly damaging your SEO efforts, it could in the long run actually cost you money. What would take a professional one hour to complete may take you half a day or more, have a negative impact on your websites rankings and if done incorrectly cost you even more time to put right.
  5. You may have to organise hosting and maintenance for your site, email account and domain names.

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