What are Content Management Systems?
Content Management Systems provide webmasters with a framework for building websites that are easy to maintain, with regard to creating, editing, searching, organizing, and archiving content. In addition, a CMS offers people that have little or no technical knowledge in web design a chance to create and manage their sites.
Website design and development has dramatically changed over the years, due to an increase in the requirements for building successful sites. Initially, building a site was simply a matter of putting together one or two static HTML pages, containing information that was rarely updated.
Website management trends have changed tremendously. Modern websites have come to life, with most of them containing millions of pages that are updated frequently and thus, experience daily growth. Static HTML cannot possibly handle the dynamic nature of these modern sites. For this reason, webmasters prefer content management systems.
The Benefits of CMS
A content management system( CMS) is an application to create and manage content on your website. You can edit text, add your own images, video, music, and even code that can be viewed by your customers. A CMS gives you the ability to control and maintain your website without the hassel of sending your updates for someone else to implement.
Cost Effective
Content management systems enable people with limited web design skills to manage their websites on their own. Unlike static websites, which would require them to learn some coding or hire skilled persons to make changes to the site, CMS makes it easy to create, edit, and manage content. Site owners can therefore, make great savings from money that they would otherwise have used to hire expert web designers. On the other hand, there are most of the CMS solutions are freeware; site owners do not have to pay for them.
User-Friendly
With CMS, site owners do not have to struggle with updating their sites. They can easily change the look and feel i.e. the templates, layout, and the positions of menus and other elements on their sites. In addition, they can add, delete, and update content frequently. Users do not have to understand HTML, PHP, JavaScript, or any other coding language. Since most content management systems use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interfaces, site operations are simply matter of point-and-click, or drag-and-drop.
Unlimited Pages and Content
The greatest shortcoming with static websites was the limitation in adding pages and content. As the number of pages increased, the sites became heavier and made navigation impossible. Content management systems are designed with a backend for storing site data. Since the database is separate, the site is able to remain robust, regardless of the number of pages or amount of content the user creates. Therefore, sites powered by CMS are able to hold an unlimited number of pages, and massive amounts of data.
Enhanced Security
Content management systems usually store information in a database, thus making it easy for site owners to deploy access control mechanisms to protect their websites. For instance, it is easy to configure the database to accept connections from the CMS only. As such, any unauthorized access from other sources would be deemed as attacks, and appropriate mechanisms deployed to deal the situation.
Collaboration
Content management systems come with internal workflow engines that facilitate collaboration in the creation, editing, and approval of site content before it can be published. As such, it becomes easy for site owners to work as a team in managing web content.
