Do You Need A Content Management System?

If you have a website, you may already have a management system in place. A content management system is simply some process for managing content on your Web site. Perhaps you paid money for software that helps manage that process. Maybe your current system was built by some professional. Or, it could be that you manage your content by typing stuff in Word and sending it to a Web professional to put on the Web. Whatever you do, you have a system.

However, until you have a basic understanding of how your system works (or does not work), knowing how you can improve it is challenging. Here are a few questions to get you started.

• Does updating critical Web content take too long?
• Is your IT staff often overwhelmed by requests to make changes to the Web site?
• Are people frequently unable to access the web content to make changes?
• Is your web site without consistent branding, look and feel, or navigation?
• When you make changes to the site, are you unaware of what changes were made?
• Do you publish your site every other week?

If you answered YES to any of the previous questions, you require the assistance of a content management system. If all the questions were answered YES, then you have a serious problem on your hands. There is a solution available, but first…

What is a CMS?

A CMS (Content Management System) is a system that’s designed to help you manage your Web content publishing process. Believe it or not, content management systems have been around for a long time. In fact, they’ve been around a lot longer than the Web.

A lot has changed in the last few years, however. Organizations already have Web sites in production use. Most of these Web sites were created with authoring tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, and may use one of several scripting languages like ASP, JSP, PHP, or ColdFusion to assemble and deliver the content. Today’s content management problem is more about helping organizations manage these existing sites than helping Web development teams create new ones from scratch. This difference may be subtle but it strongly affects the way you approach content management. There is a wide range of free and open source content management systems to build off from rather than reinventing the CMS wheel.

As you look for solutions to your content management problem, understanding a bit about the evolution of the content management industry may be helpful.

Long before the Web was wildly popular, large-scale publishers used systems for managing print production. As the Web caught on, it was only natural that companies with print production roots (such as newspapers) sought to take advantage of the new medium.

Many packaged content management systems were designed for the publishing industry (and in some cases by publishers themselves) and were adapted for the rest of us. Other systems started out as document repositories and later had Web capabilities bolted and duct-taped on top of them. All of these early systems had at least one thing in common: The systems were designed for organizations that were building new Web sites.