Content Management Systems make it easy for non-technical users to maintain a website and keep it current.
A Content Management System ( CMS ) allows you to log into an administration area of a website and …
- Edit existing website pages using an online text editor similar to any basic word processor.
- Add new pages.
- Change the order of pages and articles etc.
- Update the menu on the website.
- Upload images into a library – store all your PNGs, PDFs, GIFs, and JPEGs online for easy use.
- Preview your website pages – see how they look before going live.
We mostly use the WordPress CMS, though have created a LOT of websites using Joomla as well. While its possible to keep abreast of most of the developments in this area, its very difficult to be proficient in working with every available CMS, so we specialise in WordPress.
Important advantages are …
- From the point of view of longevity of the website, there is a huge 3rd party development community, which makes it very easy for any future developers to continue or update the websites if needed.
- It’s extremely modular, which means that future website extensions don’t require starting from scratch and losing existing work.
- There are already hundreds of 3rd party components available and in the following list of proposed solutions you’ll see that most can be provided by customising already existing components.
- Considering security, WordPress releases updates to it’s code very regularly to maintain integrity of, and provide advances in security.
- WordPress also makes it far easier to get found in search results. It started as a blogging application, but has evolved into a reliable publishing platform.
A standard WordPress installation provides …
- the ability to edit existing website pages, including the upload of images,
- the ability to add further pages and manage menu items,
- a search function.
It can be extended with …
- Protected pages available only to logged in users. If the page is navigated to by someone who hasn’t logged in, they’ll be presented with a login form instead, allowing registration and access to additional website content;
- Forms;
- E-commerce and online shops.
Tailored / Customised components
Over the last decade there’s been a huge growth in the number of prebuilt components available to website designers and programmers, especially those written in the PHP programming language. It saves a great amount of time when you’re able to create websites from these, rather than entirely from scratch, and allows far more to be provided for way smaller budgets than writing custom code.
Components and package code on the web are constantly being improved and released as improved versions. This is good, yet when it comes to customising a component developed by others, it results in the need for a special handling.
If a component is customised by a party other than the original developers, then updates provided by them are unlikely to install correctly. This prevents an end-user with little programming knowledge from performing an installation themselves. The solution is to have the developer who performed the customisation handle the upgrade, which is an easy solution, but should be noted as it will likely incur a charge.