Great! So you’ve decided that you want a content management system (CMS)? There a few things that you must understand.
Flexibility. A CMS can be an amazing tool, allowing you to disperse the most up-to-date information to your audience in a fast, simple and efficient way. If you’ve ever used MS-Word then you can be up and using a CMS in no time at all. A well-built CMS tool offers you the golden key into the world of web development without having to learn a line of computer code.
Growth. A CMS is the perfect tool that lets you add onto it as you and your needs grow. To start out with, most people are looking to simply convey information through their website. This can be achieved through a base CMS package. Later on this person may find that they need a way to send out a monthly email to those who would like to subscribe to the latest news. This can be achieved easily with a CMS by adding, or “plugging-in” a pre-built “module” that accomplishes this task. Some of the more popular CMS open-source communities are so large that a plugin exists for almost any needs that you might have.
Cost. Up front, a CMS can easily cost multiples of what a standard-build (static) website would cost. Like many things in life, there is a tradeoff blanace that you achieve over time. As time progresses you will inevitably incur costs as you find that you need additions, updates and modifications to your static site. With a properly-built CMS, however, you should not run into these issues. You can add/remove pages, modify menu items, add/remove content, and that should be all you need for minor day-to-day changes. Again though, you pay for the flexibility associated with a CMS up front and reap the benefits over time, especially when adding modules or increased functionality in the future.
Design Limitations. Out-of-the-box CMS’s are built to be powerful, flexible and capable of growing with you. The fact is, though, that the more complex the layout or design of the website, the less flexible your CMS will be, as a system. For instance, a tailored and highly customized menu system can make a site look tremendous. Often times, implementing such a system would require the use of image buttons to realize this vision. So doing effectively takes you out of the framework of the CMS for the navigation menu system. Your site will still function - it will still run off of the content you enter and you will have the ability to modify any of the pages but now if you need any modifications to the menu system, you have to go back into your custom code to make modifications.
Content. Along the same lines of the Design Limitations, a CMS is just that - Content Management. The true purpose of a CMS is to hold content in a designated location on each page. Creating and formatting text, images, links, and the like are all natives and adhere to the intended purpose of a CMS. Application programming, custom scripts and the like are not native. This type of content and associated effects can be achieved but this again will take you out of the realm of editable content and back into custom code. This is not to say that your site has to be boring - if, however, you are looking for a lot of interactivity on your site, a CMS may not be the best choice after all.
