Content Management - What Is A CMS?

Posted by raj on 04/19/06 in Acronyms, Content management, What is

Content Management Systems (CMS) are a class of software used to build and manage web pages. If you have a medium to large website, in terms of number of webpages, you probably need a CMS. A lesser form of CMS is a weblogging (blogging) platform. A CMS is pretty much a necessity if you plan for your website to eventually have a lot of web pages, and/or if you have several contributors for articles.

CMSes can be free, or upwards of $2 million, when you factor in the installation, configuration and maintenance. I’ve worked on several very large website redesign projects, where the budget was in the high seven figures. But if you’re just a small business planning a website, or if you have a website but need to manage it better, there is no need to spend loads of money setting up. In fact, with a bit of savvy and a few Internet skills that you can learn, you could set up an attractive site by spending nothing more than your time, and maybe the cost of a few books.

Why the discrepancy? Well, the need for a CMS for medium to large websites has been around since the Internet went public. But in recent years, web developers who have wanted to run their own website decided to write simplified, custom code for their needs. Over time, these mini-CMS packages developed, but have always been available for free. These developers are part of the OpenSource movement which, in a nutshell, believes in sharing ideas and software, without restricting your ability to modify that software.

Keep that in mind. With OpenSource CMS packages, you can tweak the code to suit your needs, if necessary. If you can’t do it yourself, you might hire someone to do it for you - and you wouldn’t be breaking the terms of use. Unless you tried to sell the modified software without offering the exact same OpenSource terms.

What’s more, there are many web designers offering their web page templates for free. Some of these templates have been tweaked to work only with a specific CMS or blogging platform. Others are generic, so they need to be tweaked with your chosen CMS. This is an area where you made need to spend a little bit of money - either in having a custom page template made for you, or having a generic OpenSource template tweaked for your platform.

If you don’t have the budget to hire anyone to help you set up your website, the good news is that there are a lot of websites on the Internet that’ll teach you the light coding aspects of how to set up a CMS/ blog platform, then show you how to tweak it. You will need to understand the basics of a web page (HTML), but I’ve met dozens of non-technical people who’ve picked up an general understanding of HTML in a couple of days. A good book or website is a starting point.

Chameleon Integration publishes a number of weblogs that focus on different aspects of setting up and maintaining a website. Some of these blogs are non-technical, some are technical, and others are in between. If you’re relatively new to setting up or managing a website for your small or medium business, here’s a starting point:

ItsMyBizniz - This is probably the least technical of our weblogs, and geared at the small business person and Intrepreneur (Internet entrepreneur). At the time of this writing, ItsMyBizniz is under construction, so you may not find many articles yet. If that’s the case, please check back regularly, as we do have a large list of articles under development.
WebGuru - This weblog is geared at those bloggers and webmasters who need to solve some web programming and database problems. While the discussions are generally geared to newbie web developers, the site is not an introduction to programming. You’ll need some existing skills in that regard. Programming languages focused are Perl and PHP, with mySQL being the focus for database systems. Problems focused on are advanced CMS customization, as well general webmastering problems.

We may publish other relevant weblogs in the future. If you have a question about a specific website management issue, please do feel free to drop a comment on this article, or any other relevant article. We’ll do our best to respond in a timely fashion.

Technorati Tags: technobabble, techno babble, CMS, blogging platform, managing websites