Content Management Systems or CMS is a term that is spoken about by many web design companies but what does it actually mean to you as a someone who may be looking for a new website.
Simply explained for the purpose that we are dealing with (websites), a content management system allows you to add, alter or remove content from your website in an easy to control manner using an text editor rather than html code (web code).
We work with WordPress and it is quite straightforward to learn to use with no prior knowledge of websites. You will need a little training or you could watch the numerous YouTube clips there are out there. WordPress out of the box is made up of pages and posts. Understanding how to use them is your first step to running a successful website.
Pages are what we will call static, your services, about you, your business benefits and these rarely change. They stay where they are but they do need to be updated for example if an image needs to be updated, a product changes or you may have a new phone number. A CMS will allow you to do this if set up correctly without ever touching a piece of code. WordPress has a “What you see is what you get” (wysiwyg) visual editor to make this as simple as possible.
Posts are a date driven communication, you could be sharing facts, opinion or news – posts are part of a system that is dynamic. It can index your content by categories, tags and also by date so that information can be stored and retrieved easily. It does all of this automatically, it’s dynamic, you just need to add the content and then decide how you will share it.
WordPress isn’t as straightforward as some of the website builders out there and it was not initially designed to be a content management system. There are addons that you can use to make it easier to use as a CMS.
Here are a couple of available plugins to give you a bit more control without needing any code, we haven’t tested these but if we do will update this post.