Web Site Design and Content Management Systems(CMS)

People often consider the use of a Content Management System (CMS) when designing a web site.

This article provides some alternative approaches for you to consider if you feel you need a Content Management System (CMS).

The ups and downs of Content management Systems

The attraction is the ability to update your website yourself without needing a lot of website design skill, knowledge and experience. The down side coincidently is that websites are being updated by people with little website design skill, knowledge or experience.

"CMS - brilliant tool"

"CMS - too many problems"

So the reality of the situation is that Content Management Systems can suit some people very well by giving them

control with the ability to update their own website in their own time frame without the trouble, cost and delays involved with relying on a third party

while for others a Content Management System is

difficult and confusing to use, inflexible, limiting and has locked them in to a specific system and supplier

I have been involved in the use and design of Content Management Systems for web site since 1999 and have mixed feelings about them. I started off thinking they were a brilliant solution to the problem of regular content maintenance. Now I think they are often more trouble than they are worth.

There are a number of options that could be considered for managing your web site content:

1. A standard Content Management System (CMS)

A Content Management System normally consists of sophisticated set of additional web site pages (plus a database) which allow authorised users to amend the web site pages (within limits) in a user friendly interface (that hides all the code) through a web browser (which usually needs to be a recent version IE from Microsoft). In theory you do not need website design experience to maintain your website if it is equiped with a Content Management System. In practice you will probably will need at least some web design skills or training.

The website pages have to be coded specifically to use the relevant Content Management System so there is an element of being locked in to the particular system. There is likely to be a significant up front extra cost involved in adding a Content Management System but a good saving made on regular maintenance costs.

There can be limitations on flexibility that may impact search engine performance and accessibility requirements.

Content Management Systems often have higher end hosting requirements – often a dedicated server specifically either requiring windows or requiring linux. Shared hosting arrangements are often not suitable.

2. The Web Designers Way

At the other end of the scale is updating a website exactly as a web designer would

This requires a good web design program. Dreamweaver from Adobe, previously Macromedia, is generally regarded as the best by most website designers. A popular alternative for amateur web designers is Microsoft Front Page but most professional website designers would not use this program. There are plenty of other web design programs - or HTML editors - of varying levels of quality available.

"There are also a lot of non-web design programs, like Word, that will create web pages but do not use them."

Dreamweaver has a very good GUI mode. On the negative side, as it is the professional web designers’ tool of choice, it can do much more than you might need. A little guidance in it’s use may be appropriate. It is a comparatively expensive piece of software.

The web design or HTML editor would run on your local pc editing copies of the website files. When the pages (plus images, pdfs etc) are ready they are then sent by FTP (built in to some web design programmes - or you can use a readily available FTP programme) up to the website hosting arrangement to become live.

Please note I use Dreamweaver all the time so can easily support you in using it. I can use Front Page if I have to but try to avoid it so I would not be able to provide the same level of support to you using that or other HTML editors.

3. A good compromise solution

is a product called Contribute also from Adobe, previously Macromedia

Contribute is a specially cut down version of Dreamweaver. It works in much the same way as Dreamweaver except that it is intended for use by people who want to easily update the content of their website but don’t want full website design capabilities. So it is a more straight-forward tool to use.

You will find an overview of Contribute on the Macromedia site (opens in a new browser window) . You would need to purchase your own version of Contribute.

I would then set up the website to work with the product. (Basically extra codes are added into the website pages to indicate to Contribute which parts of the web pages you can amend and which parts you can not. So usually all the design elements are set as fixed and all the content set as editable.) This is fairly straight-forward and there is the advantage that the code behind each page remains as standard HTML rather than based on the Content Management System. This means that most web designers could easily make changes to the website in the future and you are not tied in to a given Content Management System which you may or may not like using.