Content Management Systems
The Good, Bad and the Ugly. For those new to this discussion a Content Management systems refers to a program that is installed on your website and allows you to make changes to your website without having to learn how to edit websites with other programs like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
Now I would like to say up front that I’m not in favour of Content Management Software (CMS). The reason is not that I already know how to edit websites, the reason is that I have a lot of experience with companies who use these programs and have nothing but problems with them. There are a number of reasons.
- You or your website designer has to install the software that in many cases is written by a community of designers and if you don’t keep it up to date someone eventually will hack into it and then into your website.
- The design capabilities of most CMS is limited or not existent. You are forced to use their templates and in order to make major changes requires hours of work by a professional coder.
- And most important is that they are really not necessary. If you are going to spend the time to learn how to use the CMS you might as well take the same time to learn how to use a real website design program that was design to do anything you want with your website.
Now with all that said let’s look at a few of the CMS that exist. There are literally thousands out there to pick from and they have different levels of functionally. I’m not going to be able to go into all of them here however I’ll touch on the main ones. CMS can be divided into three main categories. Proprietary, Open Source and Hosted.
The Good. Propriety CMS usually are the best. They are designed up by a company and are generally the main software development for that company. They are robust and can be scaled up to hundreds of thousands of webpages with multiple contributors. You have to buy these from the software company and can be referred to as “off the shelf” products. The companies have a lot of R&D into their product. Needless to say they are also expensive.
The Bad. I tend to lump the Opensource CMS into this category. Main reasons are. They don’t have a lot of good documentation on how to run them. They are huge programs and require a lot of experience to install and manage. They work off templates so your design is rather limited. Of course the worse reason is that they are open source and hackers love to find security flaws in the program and then hack into your website. Some good examples are Mambo, PHPNuke, Wiki and Tiki.
The Ugly. Hosted CMS. These can be divided into Big Ones and Little Ones. The big ones the ones like Yahoo, Geocities, MSN. These are the website that you have to edit via their CMS. They have a little more flexibility than the Opensource programs. Domain registration companies such as Godaddy and Network Solutions also offer CMS if you register your domain and host the website with them. Where it really gets ugly is if you want to move your website to another hosting company you loose your CMS with that company and loose your website too.
Little CMS is where smaller hosting companies and website design companies also develop their own CMS. They do this to “capture” their clients. When their clients ask how they can edit their own website they website design company will sell them a CMS that is tailored to their specific company. Generally they are limited on how much design they can actually do and tend to allow the website owner only to change text on certain pages. These CMS programs are usually expensive; I’ve seen them go for $350 to setup plus a yearly license fee. Then there is the training required. If the client wants to make major changes to the website such as adding pages they have to go back to the designer and get them to do it. Which defeats the purpose of the CMS to begin with. In addition smaller companies don’t have the R&D necessary to maintain their CMS. Aas hosting operating systems change and require upgrades so must the CMS used to manage them.
Website design companies could just as easily design their websites to be edited with a program called FrontPage. It’s a Microsoft product that comes free with Microsoft Office or for $150 you can buy the upgrade off the shelf. There are very good books on how to work with frontpage and it operates very similar to Microsoft Word and other office products. Some of the benefits for using FrontPage are that your website is now portable and you are not locked to one hosting or website design company. It’s generally less expensive and with about an hours training anyone can be taught to use it. Websites that are designed to be edited with FrontPage can be edited with just about any other website design program. The learning curve is smaller than most CMS.
So while a number of people seem to be looking for CMS for their website with a couple of hours training and a properly designed website FrontPage is just as good if not better than any CMS off the shelf or suggesting by your website designer. Because whether or not you like Microsoft they are going to be around for awhile. If you website designer goes out of business or you want to move your hosting you are going to be paying a lot of extra money to do that.
The Nisa Team
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