Open-Source Content Management Systems

What advantages accrue from the use of a Content Management System—particularly an open-source CMS?

A good managed content site provides you with great flexibility in establishing the character and quality of the visitor’s experience when she or he drops in on your site.

Open-source Content Management Systems draw the content a visitor selects from an underlying relational database. Click another link, and new content is displayed. Nothing new about that, but…there isn’t a new “page” to build, so the content is seen much faster than with a traditional site.

You will quickly achieve significant cost benefits from a well-designed content management system. Content management means that you store your content in a database so that you can use and reuse it as you need. When you need to modify content, you and your staff modify it only once, despite the different media forms you use to publish it.

Responsive Design

Each major open-source CMS today fully integrates responsive design features and capabilities, especially the Bootstrap framework that drives most mobile Web apps. How you and your design team implement these features depends, of course, on your analyses and decisions.

Flexibility

You can establish and structure extranets or intranets through a managed content system; most open-source CMSs can be easily made into what Web designers call portals—links take the visitor to sections that deal with specific content or operations, such as on-line Help or Help Desk support, where registered users can “talk” on-line with your support staff or create support tickets easily.

Update Content Easily

Products and prices change constantly. A managed content site can be used to host an on-line store, through which you can sell goods or services. When you add or remove items, change prices, or stop offering a particular service or item, you merely unpublish it; you do not have to have the site code re-written.

Great User Experience

Managed content sites tend to earn the approval of Web visitors and get them to return much more often than a static brochure site. Such Websites are popular not only with visitors, but with your staff, too.

Interoperability

Managed content sites are modular in construction; you can always take advantage of a superior new component that offers greater benefits to you and your business. For instance, you will not need a special software tool to set up and run a shopping cart or to connect securely with your merchant account.

Not Using a CMS?

Without a CMS, You have no control.

You can only change the content by providing new copy to your Webmaster. If you need to remove or add pages, the Webmaster has to not only add or retire the physical HTML pages, but also revise the Web links on each page.

 Without a CMS, it’s expensive to change the site.

Calendars, forms of any kind, comment sections—all must be designed and coded by a programmer.

 It will be harder and harder for visitors to find your site.

The Web search engines send out non-invasive code elements to identify, classify, and catalog all sites on the World-Wide Web. After your site is cataloged, the search engines will come back every two weeks or so to re-catalog it based on the date the site content was modified. If the content on your site changes infrequently, the search engines push it further down the hit list of sites returned when a visitor conducts a search.