Why do you need a content management system (CMS)?

Category: Blog

Written by EndChapter Internet Marketing

The traditional way of building websites, is to build each page as a static page, most commonly people build pages in Dreamweaver, push the pages via FTP to a web server, and that’s your site. While this has been a perfectly fine method for simple web sites, it actually has some serious limitations. We believe that building websites in a content management system (CMS) has a lot of benefits and we encourage everyone to look at moving in that direction. You may feel like using a content management system is going to add a lot of complexity and make your website more expensive, but once you’ve moved up the learning curve a little bit we think you will find that is really not true. With good tools, things do not necessary need to be more complex or more expensive.

Some of the limitations of a static website, are that in a static website, all of the code and content are mixed together. Typically only the person, who is comfortable editing the code, can maintain the website. In a content management system, you can separate out the code and the content.

Secondly, in a content management system, you can have rich features like blogs, and RSS feeds. In a static website, each page has to be built manually. You do not get the ease and the convenience of being able to just – add a blog post– or simply add new content to the website. This is a very effective technique for improving the search engine results and for keeping the website fresh as well as keeping your website visitors engaged. Having a text editor or blogging software built into the website makes it very easy to add content and keep the website up-to-date. You just can’t do that on a primitive static website.

Third, with a content management system, you can automate the creation of certain pages. You may have-- for example-- a listing of events. How many website have you been to where they listed their events on the home page that has already passed? In a content management system with database support, you can have the events stored in a database and automatically have the next upcoming events displayed on the home page. If an event is passed, it won’t display at all – it’s automatic.

Finally, a content management system allows you to enter content, once and only once. For example, if you have a news item, and you wish to list the title of the news item on the homepage, and then you have a details page that lists the entire news item which has this title again – you are only entering that title in one place. That title is then used both on the home page and on the details page. This both simplifies the task of entering content and eliminates inconsistencies.

For these and a variety of other reasons, we believe it is very valuable for you and your clients to move to building websites in a content management system. At EndChapter Internet Marketing, we’ve helped hundreds of people make that transition to a content management system, and we would be glad to help you make that transition too.