If you are a site owner wanting to be able to update and manage your own websites, a dynamic Content Management System (CMS) is what you should be looking for. CMS is a platform for building websites that allows you to take more control over your own website and without having anything to do with HTML coding. And you can do all this very cheap by eliminating your web developer completely or by reducing your dependence on him.
Why Upgrade to a CMS?
Control Your own Website. With a CMS you will be able to make most changes to your website: add, edit or delete a page, update your events calendar, add photos or embed a video. You can easily create your email newsletter too. And all this can be done by anyone who does not know any HTML or CSS coding. Your only responsibility is to continually create content that attracts and converts customers.
Moreover you can also change the look and feel of your website periodically by installing readymade themes available on the internet
Clean web based coding. The popular WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver add a lot of bulky code to Web pages. Moreover the sites created with those editors may not be compatible with modern browsers such as Firefox and Chrome. Open source CMSs provide clean coding which is compatible with all popular browsers and that too without the need of installing any software on your computer. The entire coding platform is web based and can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection.
Control Your Social Media Presence. Most open source CMSs offer some a blogging tool and community discussion forums to engage visitors on your website regularly. This is very important in today’s Web 2.0 scenario as a blog or a forum provides an interactive place for visitors and allows feedback and conversation. Most CMS platforms also offer other tools of social media, such as RSS feeds and options that allow site visitors to bookmark and share your content, enabling viral marketing on your behalf.
Popular CMS solutions
Popular free open-source CMS solutions include Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. While proper CMS solutions like Joomla and Drupal are more powerful and more scalable, they have a steeper learning curve. Hence you find many users preferring to use WordPress, which is actually a blogging platform that has evolved and matured into a full fledged CMS. This can be done by simply using WordPress themes which provide a CMS feel to the underlying blogging platform. It is easier to learn and no site is too small or big for WordPress.
One click installers
If you want it to make even simpler to run your own website without having to employ a developer, you can use one click installers such as Fantastico which come bundled with the popular cPanel control panel. You can not only install your desired CMS platform such as WordPress or Joomla but also install other software such as phpbb forums or SMF forums on your website to get your own community forums up and running in no time and without any technical knowledge.
Conclusion
There are few websites out there that wouldn’t benefit from being built or rebuilt on a CMS platform. And CMS isn’t just for new sites; you can convert your current static site over to a CMS as well. Take control of your website by making the move today.
