What is content?
Before a firm can manage content, it needs to understand what actually constitutes content in terms of their website. "Content tends to be more of an industry term. It means anything that actually appears on your site," says Patrick Bates, managing director of Webtrade, a web development firm. A CMS is useful because it can cut out the complications that might arise when maintaining a website. "The whole idea is to make it easy for organisations to update information, allowing them to keep control over their website," says Piero Tintori, managing director of content management provider Terminalfour.
Simply put, a CMS is a software system that provides simple tools to manage the information posted on a website. By using a CMS, firms can cut out the middle man - a web designer or developer - and update their site themselves, as and when they see fit. "It allows users to keep content on the site up-to-date without having to go to a designer," says Gerry Forde, technical director of content management provider New Odyssey.
Management benefits
A CMS can provide website owners with many benefits. Joe Molloy, director of web development firm Hyper-Typer, offers a list of advantages, saying a CMS can:
- enable you to add new content or make changes to existing content quickly and easily
- reduce the maintenance costs of your website, removing the need to employ the services of specialised web authors each time you make changes to the site
- improve site navigation by utilising the structuring, cross-linking (when two websites link to one another) and search tools a CMS provides
- dramatically improve the scalability of your site - meaning it can grow with your business - thanks to categorisation, navigational and archiving facilities
- support decentralised authoring: different departments in your organisation can independently add information directly to the site.
Do I need a CMS?
But before implementing a CMS, businesses should assess other possible options. Blogs and discussion forums also offer a means to manage content, either as add-ons to a website or potentially as alternatives to a CMS. "Blogs can be used as alternatives but it depends what your site's purpose is," says Forde. "For personal websites they can be appropriate."
Most experts agree that while blogs are useful, businesses should be wary of using them as full-scale alternatives to a CMS. "It is true that blogs provide the user with an avenue to add content in a chronological order to the web, and that discussion forums allow you to host an online debate, but if you need full control of your site for sales, marketing, customer support or other business reasons, you are going to need a proper content management system," says Clive Kent, commercial director of software firm pTools.
Flexible future
Technology is constantly changing and businesses regularly look to upgrade or replace systems they have in place. In the case of a CMS, upgrading is often easy for SMEs, especially when compared to the effort required by larger firms to make similar moves.
Mary Attenborough, technical director of web design firm Webbery, says making the change is normally straightforward for SMEs and that they need not worry about losing control of the information stored on a CMS. "You always own your own content so you can move to a different system in the future. Obviously for a large site that could take some time but most small businesses only have websites of up to ten pages or maybe 100 pages." Despite the flexibility of the systems that are generally available, firms should still ensure that the CMS they buy is capable of growing with their business and is easy to replace if needs be.
By choosing the right CMS, even websites that are already up and running can easily begin to manage content. "Integrating a CMS with an existing site from a technical point of view is a relatively painless process," says Molloy. "All established CMS offerings on the market provide the ability to integrate with the 'look and feel' of an existing site."
While these systems offer huge benefits to SMEs in terms of reducing the cost and time required in sourcing professional staff to update a website, firms still need to be careful when choosing a product. There is a wide variety of systems on the market, and firms can opt for getting one specially designed to meet their needs or go for an off-the-shelf system. Either way, businesses should ensure that the CMS they choose can meet their needs. "Go to somebody you can trust. Find a firm with a good track record, look at their other clients and see if they are happy with the system," says Attenborough.