A quick-start guide to taking control of your web presence
Who edits and updates your company website? If you’re tired of paying a designer or developer to make even small changes to your site, or you just want to have more direct control over the content that it contains, this article is for you. A content management system (CMS) is any website platform that allows site owners/administrators to change, add or delete content from their website with no knowledge of coding or web technologies. If you can operate a computer, you can use a CMS. Below we will discuss the pros and cons of each of the predominant CMS systems. Let’s get started…
The Great Unifier: WordPress
AEI used WordPress as the foundation for Mind Over Bar, who sells downloadable courses online. (click to enlarge)
WordPress originates from humble beginnings as a blogging platform. At its core, it is essentially a content publisher, offering quick and easy text editing, inclusion of images and rich media, and logical categorization of content. Over the years, WordPress has evolved to become a more robust system that allows for the addition of plug-ins — modular pieces of software that can be added that extend the capabilities of the system. Using plug-ins, you could enhance your control over search engine optimization (SEO), collect visitor information (analytics), offer event scheduling/registration, sell products… the list is almost endless. Another important development in the WP platform is the ability to “theme” your site, or customize its appearance. Themes can be found for free, bought, or created from scratch in order to generate a completely custom design. WordPress is so ubiquitous these days that most web hosting companies include it as a “1-click install,” making it relatively easy to integrate with your website. And managing a WP site is even easier; if you can write a letter with Microsoft Word, you can create and edit pages with WordPress.
If a client wants to have control over the content of their site, WordPress is generally considered to be the go-to system. Even in website projects that are more robust than just textual content, it can deliver capable results on par with sites that have traditionally cost a lot more money to produce. Angled End has used WP to build sites with “members only” content, registration forms, maps, and even lightweight e-commerce.
The Big Guns: Drupal and Joomla
PeopleSync’s needs, as a larger company with broad content publishing needs, called for a Drupal foundation. (click to enlarge)
Drupal and Joomla are the more robust, more complex content management cousins of WordPress. For the sake of fluidity and because we have more experience with Drupal, we’ll simply refer to that system here, but for clarity, both systems are comparable in terms of their power and function.
Are you sure
you want that CMS?
While content management systems are often a good idea, the decision to base your site on one should be carefully considered. Some sites really just don’t need it. Before jumping in, ask yourself: Do I really want to manage my own content? Do I mind paying someone else to manage that? Do I have complex information delivery needs? If the answer to those questions is a clear “no,” then it might not make sense to add 20%-50% to your website budget to build it using a CMS. And the costs aren’t limited to installation, building, and configuring the system. Every CMS requires periodic upgrades and maintenance to keep the system running smoothly and securely. A CMS makes sense for a lot of businesses – maybe most – but certainly not all of them.
Drupal is, at its foundation, a system for assigning permission to do things. That may seem like an obtuse statement, so let’s add a little bit of context. If you have articles on your site that everyone should be able to see, no problem. Do you want to have videos that only registered members can take make use of? Piece of cake. Or perhaps you want only premium members to be able to download a particular white paper… you get the idea. On top of this permission system, Drupal has a set of core functions, such as publishing, organizing content, sorting content, scheduling content, and even building custom content types (one of our favorite features). One example of this is a music store site that I helped to build a year ago. The client needed a way to display their products online (one type of content) and include profiles of their instructors as well (another content type). For each of these, we built input forms that the store owner fills out in order to easily add that content to their site. We can then use data contained in those product or profile pages to organize the content into groups that are useful to their customers. For example, we can easily include a page on the site that only shows guitars by filtering out all of the other types of instruments. Or we could show a page only displaying a particular brand/manufacturer. In short, Drupal allows us a tremendous amount of freedom around the display and automated organization of our content. And as with WordPress, there is no shortage of plug-ins and theme options for customizing the what the site can do or what it looks like. For large, complex sites, Drupal is often our first choice.
Like WordPress, Drupal is offered as a 1-click install with most hosts, but the similarity, in terms of ease of use, stops there. Drupal is not for the feint of heart – it takes a good bit of time and effort to install and configure. While making use of the finished product is reasonably easy for anyone, getting the system setup is definitely a task best left to the geeks.
Tailor Made: the Custom CMS
Surfbreak Rentals might have worked as a Drupal site, but achieving the required results would probably have cost more. (click to enlarge)
When neither WordPress nor Drupal are flexible enough to offer the specific sorts of information delivery or features that you need, it’s time to consider using a custom CMS: a website foundation that is built from the ground up rather than adapted from existing software. While a solution like this is less modular and portable than those mentioned above, it is inherently more flexible and potentially less expensive, since you are essentially creating features on an as-needed basis. Those features can be dedicated to the external display of information, the internal organization of how that information is fed into the system, or both, and it can potentially offer all of the same levels of functionality that Drupal and WordPress contain.
That sums up our introduction to Content Management Systems. Hopefully you’ve gained a broad understanding of what the major options are in this increasingly important area of web design and development. Let us know what you think in the comment form below, and feel free to ask us any questions! Oh, and one more thing about CMS-based websites: you’re reading from one right now.
Dan Lipe is a creative engineer at Angled End.