What is Content Management System (CMS) and Why Do You Need One?

Keeping your website with fresh content is very important for your business. You don’t want to show news happening 2 years ago or displaying outdated products or irrelevant information in your site, moreover on its front page.

That’s why almost all modern websites are developed with backend platform called Content Management System or CMS to manage content easier.

A good CMS offer user friendly control panel to help web administrator insert or edit new content such as company information, news, and articles. Text editor is built with various tools to manage content such as bolding the text or making them italic, insert bullet list, alignment, insert links, etc.

You don’t have to understand HTML or other technical skill to update content.

What can you update with CMS?

If you know Microsoft Word, you will surely be able to use CMS. Writing articles, inserting photos, uploading videos and creating pages are some of the basic features.

You will be provided with “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor and various buttons and tools to make your contents presentable. After you have completed updating, there’s a button for you to save and publish it online.

Where your contents are being saved to?

Not like the old time, your contents are not being saved in the pages, but they are saved in a database.

This has some advantages including easier data management and migration. Let’s say, you want to change the design of your site, you can modify it directly. Your data will not be disturbed. After the modification is done, you can move the data to the new site safely.

What are some of the popular CMS platforms?

There are many CMS platforms, free and paid, available on the internet: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, TinyCMS, Concrete5 and many others.

I won’t be reviewing each of them but you can give them a try to decide which one suit you.

However, you can consider Wordpress. The reasons are it is flexible, mature, have selection of plugins for additional features and supported by large number of communities.

But isn’t WordPress a blogging platform?

Yes, it is and it still is. But the things related to web management that we can do with WordPress is impressively expanding since its first launched in May 2003. Thanks to the large communities and plugin creation.

Report shows that in 2014, there’re already 76.5 million websites including blogs use WordPress as their CMS platforms. And this number grow each year.

Having the ability to manage your website and updating it with fresh contents are essential for your business. A well managed website means a well managed brand and a well managed business as well.

All time fresh online presence will result in huge impact in your business success.