What is CMS on a website?
A CMS (Content Management System) is an application that allows you to manage your website’s content. There are many CMS systems, but few are as popular and easy to use as WordPress.
This article will explore what a CMS is, how a CMS can help your business, what different CMS systems there are available, and the top 3 CMS to consider when looking for CMS development services.
Using a content management system
Content Management System servers usually require some type of user credentials in order to access their back-end functionality: Once in the backend a user can:
- Create or update blog posts;
- Images, documents, videos, and other content can be uploaded for use throughout the site;
- Format pages with layout templates;
- Add plugins for additional functionality to the site, such as reviews and content sliders.
Benefits of a CMS for small to medium sized businesses
A CMS can help your business in several ways.
A content management system is often the heart and soul of a business’s website as it facilitates the coordinating and organisation of the different types of digital content. For eCommerce websites, a CMS system assists with managing shopping carts and the checkout process.
Publishers use CMS tools for managing articles and related metadata such as images (with alt text for accessibility), links, or videos.
Without a CMS updating the content on your business website, users would require some knowledge of the programming languages involved in website development such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript & PHP. This would be a time-consuming and costly process, needing to hire a web developer or learn web development every time you would like to update the content on your business website.
In short, a CMS allows a user to quickly and efficiently create, modify, delete as well as customise content on a website with little to no knowledge of a programming language.
Popular content management systems
To give you an idea of common systems, there are three content management systems that most businesses and website developers will consider; Shopify, WordPress and Drupal.
These three CMS tools all offer comprehensive features but also have their pros and cons depending on the type of project you need them for. We recommend taking into account what each system’s benefits, advantages and use cases are.
For example, you would only need a Shopify platform if you were planning on having eCommerce on your website. However, WordPress would likely be a better choice if you plan to add lots of content and resources for your website users.
Here’s a short summary of three common content management systems:
1. WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS’s available, powering a whopping 40% of all websites on the internet.
WordPress has a huge community of developers and support that are continually working to bring new features to WordPress and keep it at the forefront of website development.
With WordPress’s popularity however comes drawbacks, it has become somewhat oversaturated with people who claim to be WordPress developers but in reality are very poor at what they do, meaning finding the perfect developer to build on top of the WordPress CMS can sometimes be a struggle, especially if you have a limited budget.
2. Drupal
Drupal is a fully customisable CMS software that is most often used by websites of a higher magnitude in terms of traffic or number of pages, such as newspapers, magazines & other publications.
Drupal’s advantage is that it offers a higher amount of customisation out of the box than WordPress does and is tailored towards developers rather than the users. This offers a great amount of flexibility but also means good developers are able to charge a premium price, especially considering the Drupal community is a lot smaller than its WordPress counterpart.
3. Shopify
Shopify is a CMS software suited specifically to eCommerce websites with its own storefront functionality.
It offers a really quick and simple way for users to purchase goods as well as a way for businesses to go from the drawing board to selling online in no time. The ease of setting up a Shopify storefront is the biggest advantage this CMS has over other management systems available, as everything is contained within this one platform.
This platform does have its own drawbacks though, the simplicity and ease of setting up a storefront comes at the cost of customisability, and lack of flexibility, meaning if you want a more advanced eCommerce store that looks unique you might have to look elsewhere.
Selecting the right CMS for your business
As mentioned before it is best to make sure a CMS fits your businesses needs, for many it is recommended to use WordPress, as mentioned before it has a high user base with WordPress powering more than 40% of the internet as of 2021.
This means it has an abundance of website support available from both the developers and the WordPress community alike, along with having a high number of developers and agencies to choose from for when you need to develop a custom theme for your WordPress website.
What else do I have to consider?
Once again we recommend getting in touch with a development agency that will be able to guide you through different CMS options based on your business requirements. They should also be able to help advise which CMS would work best depending on what type of site you want; static, eCommerce store, content heavy blog, etc.
For more information about website design and development, get in touch with Organik Web.