In the early days of the Internet, building a website was considered a ‘black art’. Knowledge of HTML and CSS was needed to build even the simplest of sites. Today, content management is the buzz word being used, having the ability to manage your own website without the need for specialist skills or expertise.
Before these systems, businesses would spend hundreds or even thousands with agencies for them to keep their websites updated. Today, this may be considered a rare occurrence, but back in the day when the black art term was used, the safest option was to leave the website maintenance side of things to the experts.
In recent years, there has been a wave of open source CMS systems available to use, the most famous being the likes of Drupal and WordPress. But what are the advantages of these, and do they have any drawbacks?
One of the main areas to look at to establish these arguments is usability. You have to consider what the end user wants to get out of using a content management system. A system such as Drupal may not be feasible for someone who wants to update a news page on their website. But someone who wants to manage multiple pages, levels of navigation and page layout, Drupal may be the way to go.
A lot of web design agencies have their own ‘in house’ CMS system that they offer to their clients. The main advantage of this approach is that the client will get a polished product, a system that does exactly what they need it to do, with all the unnecessary bits thrown out. However, the main drawback and most often the worry for businesses is whether the agency will still be around in years to come in order to support the system.
Communities play a big part in the development of content management systems, and the likes of Drupal and WordPress have an abundance of users contributing to both the support and development of these systems. These contributors can assist the main developers in things such as bug fixing, security issues and building extensions that will allow the content management system to do more.
So as you can see there are numerous options to allow you to manage your website. Choosing the right content management system is important in terms of inheriting a system that achieves a set goal without overwhelming the user with useless information and functionality.