An increasingly digital marketplace has left individuals and businesses looking for ways to keep up. If you don’t have experience with coding, the thought of building a website is daunting.
Furthermore, keeping it up to date integrated with a content marketing campaign is darn near impossible. Having a custom website to fit your needs doesn’t have to be either of those things. With the help of a professionally integrated developed content management system, or CMS, it’s easier than ever to manage a website of your own.
What exactly is a Content Management System
A content management system is an online web application that allows users to build, edit and manage a website. It handles all of the “behind the scene” work that could typically only be done by someone that had knowledge of coding in at least HTML. Some of the basic functions of a content management system are:
- create, publish, and archive web pages
- generate navigation elements
- track visitor statics
- manage users
- customization of pages
How do I decide which one to use
With so many content management systems on the web it can be difficult to choose the one that is best for you. A web designer, developer or creative agency can all recommend which one will meet your needs and wants. Three popular forms of CMS are WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. Backed by a community of people, they are all constantly being updated and improved.
Each varies in level of technical expertise needed and they all have specific things that they do better than the other. Finding out which one will be most beneficial for you comes from knowing what you want to accomplish with a website, your technical expertise and, and your budget.
To understand which one of these three content management sites might be the one you’re looking for, here’s a simple breakdown:
WordPress
- No technical experience needed to maintain
- Ideal for simple or complex websites
- Lots of add-ons available to expand the functionality
- Generally the least expensive
Joomla!
- Allows more control over how content is stored
- Requires some knowledge of terminology on the site
- Whoever is maintaining the site has more control over layout
Drupal
- Requires some technical expertise
- Best for community platforms with multiple online users
- Categorize and organize complex content
- Because it’s more powerful it also costs more
But I really can’t decide which one is right for me
There are people that can help you choose, and customize, the content management system that best fits your needs. They can also help you manage your content (or teach you how to manage it on your own), interpret visitor statistics and even help you develop content that makes your site more unique.
These people are probably part of an agency… you know, like ours. It’s an agency’s job to help create content marketing strategies, digital advertising campaigns, and integrate tools for measuring conversions and studying traffic.
On that note, it may be important to tailor the content of your website for SEO, or search engine optimization. This means that the content should be written so that when an individual is looking for a product or service your site will come up higher on a search engine list. We won’t get into all of the specifics of SEO, but here’s a quick post about it to help you better understand what we’re talking about. Organization and optimization of SEO friendly content is easily done with a content management system and the many plugins available through them.
CMS is here to help the not so tech savvy
When you make good use of a CMS, websites becomes an easy multifaceted tool. You can publish content faster, edit content across the entire site, setup for search engine optimization and choose to display content that helps the strategy of your site.
Content management systems add an ease of access when you are implementing new plugins, creating landing pages for ad campaigns and giving access to multiple authors, editors and administrators.
If you want to learn more or need help choosing and customizing a CMS that’s best for you contact us today.