Use a Content Management System for Your Website?
- Category: Web Designing
- Date: 26-10-2018
Whether you’re about to launch your first website for your business, or have been around the web for a while, you might be thinking about what kind of content management system to use. Before web content management software was available, businesses relied on static pages being uploaded directly to servers in order to publish their websites. For various reasons, some organisations continue to update websites this way, and have serious limitations on their ability to scale and improve their web presence.
If your website doesn’t have a content management system, and you think maybe it’s time to make the change, get to know the top reasons for using a CMS.
- Multiple editors — If you need to give website editing access to several people, there’s no better solution than a content management system. It’s the best way to provide limited, focused access to the areas of your site that need to be updated without opening up the entire site for unintended or unsanctioned changes.
- Templates — Rather than creating new pages from scratch, a CMS allows you to rely on templates you can reuse to create as many pages as necessary with the correct layout and functionality on each one. This enables your site to maintain a consistent look as it grows.
- Governance — A true content management system designed for multiple content contributors doesn’t stop at content creation and publishing. It allows you to customise and implement an editorial process or workflow to ensure all content is reviewed and approved by the right people prior to going live.
- Content focus — By separating your website content from its design, your content management system allows your marketing team to focus on producing more content to drive website traffic, improve SEO, and convert customers. Removing design and technical skills from the process makes it more efficient.
- Global changes — Through the use of templates, reusable files and assets, and various features, a content management system makes it easy to make changes across your entire website without having to update each individual page. Whether it’s a phone number, your logo, or a header image, you can update or change them globally when using a CMS.
- Ease of use — Making the management and upkeep of your website a coding-free non-technical task helps you get updates live faster, and also opens your site to more content from a larger group of contributors.
- Security — A content management system doesn’t just protect your website from overly enthusiastic content editors. Installed as an application behind your firewall, a decoupled CMS can also ensure that your site is more secure and can’t be easily exploited by hackers.
- Analytics — If you’re still uploading static pages, you might not have a good way to collect data on content performance and effectiveness. Measuring the impact of your content is critical to making it a business driver, and a CMS should enable you to track performance, or easily integrate third party tools to help you do so.
A content management system is not required for running a website, but it makes that job infinitely easier, and the time spent running the site more productive. If your website is critical to growing demand and sales for your business, implementing a CMS can help you effectively scale your website and digital marketing efforts.