Choosing the right content management system for your website
What is a Content Management System (CMS)
Basically, a CMS allows you to log into a secure online administration area and manage the content of your website. You should able to add, edit or delete most aspects to your website including: pages, news articles, blog posts, image galleries etc.
What are the benefits of using a content management system?
The benefits for using a CMS are clear:
- You can easily manage the content on your website, keeping the content fresh and removing any out of date or irrelevant pages, without any technical knowledge or having to pay a web design company
- You can make websites changes quickly and from anywhere in the world. All you need is a computer and internet connection, and you can access your CMS.
- The look and feel is already taken care of. All you have to do is enter the content for the web page or news article, and the CMS will worry about how it is presented to the world. This will then create a consistent identity throughout your website, which promotes a professional image to your visitors
- Should you want to change the look and feel of your website, then often you will only need to change a few template files, rather than having to manually update every page in your website, which will save you time and money
So what should you look for in a CMS?
There are literally 1000’s of content management systems available on the market and finding the right one can be quite a task, but there are several key areas you should look for:
- Common, clear administration screens - This might be the most important of all. Most website administrators or content contributors will not possess technical web skills, therefore it needs to be simple as possible for them to publish website content. It’s all too easy to find content management systems that are cluttered, unintuitive and difficult to use.
- Full control over all content - Be sure that your CMS is not too basic. Be sure that you are able to manage every aspect of a website. For example, you might want to the meta information (meta keywords and description are using for search engine results) on your homepage. A popular CMS called Wordpress, doesn’t allow you to do this.
- No compromises on your website design - You need to be sure that you are able to apply your look and feel without having to use an ‘out of the box’ template.
- Great in-built features - Its always useful to have a wealth of features available to you in the CMS administration area without having to install or purchase ‘add ons’. From my experience, the key features most of our clients need:
- Page management - the ability to create and manage limitless numbers of web pages
- Blog management - a blog is an informal chronicle of information about a range of subjects, such as your business developments or products launches
- Built-in version control -
- Image management - images add interest and colour to your website. You need a simple way to upload and resize images.
- Event calendars - whether you are a school advertising parents evenings and plays or a corporate company advertising exhibitions and seminars, an events calendar is a popular way to share the information. Allowing visitors to filter events by date and subject is also very useful.
- Search engine optimisation - Simply having a website isn’t enough. It’s very important that people are able to find it. If a CMS can help you out with optimising your website, then that will save you time. Things to look for:
- Friendly URLs - are your page URLs free from unfriendly looking characters, such as:
www.yourwebsite.com/?id=234§ion=98.
You want to look for friendly URLs which can contain keywords about your website, such as:
www.yourwebsite.com/services/website-design - Full control - are you able to manage all text on any webpage. You need control over page titles, meta information, header tags and content.
- Images - are you able to add alt text to images you upload. Alt text provides a description of the image, which search engines can read and store.
- Sitemaps - can sitemaps be automatically generated. Search engines use sitemaps on large websites to quickly work out a websites structure
- Great support - Sometimes you might get a little stuck using the administration area, or worse, something is causing your website to completely fail, so you need reliable support to fall back on. With an open source (free) CMS, be sure there is an extensive website, along with support forums, so you can ask questions to other users. For a commercial CMS, find out if they have telephone support, it is much more comforting to speak to a real person when things go wrong.
- Friendly URLs - are your page URLs free from unfriendly looking characters, such as:
At Little Tree, we have spent many months building our own content management system - Oak, from the ground up, trying to tick every box. It is now incredible flexible and has a growing feature list. I would love to know your opinions on what makes a great CMS and features you look for and rely on.
Thanks
James