That’s what keeps content management systems alive: they make the whole process of building and managing website easy for a non-developer type of person. In this post, you can learn how to choose the right content management for yourself and your website.

What is a content management system?

A content management system is the web software that lets you create a website without knowing any web programming skills, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and such. Instead, you can put up a website by simply pasting your post/article from the Notepad and pressing the “Publish” button.

Normally, CMSs have their own structure, such as blogs (blogging software), forums (forum software) and general content management systems, such as Joomla, etc. However, there are other systems that let you create your own site structure and layout, such as Drupal.

Before we go into picking the system, you need to define what you need before doing anything.

Define what you need

Before you even start searching for a content management system, you need to know why you are creating a website.

• Is it for your business?
• For your hobby?
• Do you want to sell any digital or tangible stuff?

Also, you’ll need to know what all you and your visitors want to do on the website.

• Do you want to just publish articles?
• Do you want to have a blog?
• Do you want a forum?
• Any classifieds section?
• An online shop, maybe?

• Do you want to build and inform a mailing list?
• Do you want others to do anything on your site?

Obviously, each of the choices will place several requirements for a CMS, such as an e-commerce (online store) module, a blog, a forum, other customization stuff and more extensions, such as mailing lists and user permissions.

So, before you even start to seek a CMS, create a list of what all you and your want to do on your website. Use your imagination. How would you and your people really like to communicate and share things on a website.

Once you have identified what you want to do, you’ll need to translate the wishes to specific system features, such as basic content publishing, a blog, a forum or a shop module with additional plug-ins (many systems allow anyone contribute a plugin or a module to enhance the platform).

After you have a list of features/wishes in front of you, you can start shopping.

Know where to look

The most obvious stop to look for a CMS is cmsmatrix.org.

Here you can select what you want your CMS to do and hit “Search”. The list will have what you’ll need, most likely. If you want, you can also select other options from the matrix, but I’d recommend not limiting yourself with something you may not need or are not absolutely determined about.

You can learn more about the CMS by clicking on its name. Bear in mind that the data may be outdated (a quick scan revealed that Drupal is incorrectly listed as not being able to have classifieds, while there is the classified ads module available on the main Drupal website).

The next step would be OpenSourceCMS.com.

Here, you can select the CMS you want (albeit through a not very usable menu) and login as an administrator. As you’ll still have to manage the CMS somehow, this should give you a good feel of what the CMS is about and how easy/hard it is to work with.

And another way to learn about various content management systems is to ask around on your favorite forums and search in your favorite search engine for ‘how to choose a CMS’ or ‘how to pick a content management system’. I am sure you’ll find a lot to absorb there. (You’ll find a list of useful articles in the pots below).

What to consider?

Of course, the main criterion when picking a platform for your website is what you and your people will be doing on it: writing articles, talking on a forum, posting ads/job listings, etc. However, another thing to remember include:

• how easy it is for you to use the system
• how easy it is for the people to use the website
• how accessible (to the people) and friendly (to the search engines) it is
• whether it can handle heavy load (through built-in load balancing/management/optimization), if you plan to develop a highly popular website
• if you can easily create other site sections within the system
• whether there’s significant documentation on the website
• whether there’s a forum on the main website to ask questions

Normally, you’ll learn everything you need to know, if you read various CMS comparison posts, such as these:

• Open source or commercial CMS
• What criteria to consider?
• How to choose a CMS?
• 2006 CMS award winners
• Drupal vs Joomla (Drupal forums discussion)
• Drupal vs Joomla (Joomla forums discussion)
• Push Vs. Pull – The Battle for the Best CMS
• They hate Drupal, they love Drupal
• Why I love Drupal

Drupal

Now that you can estimate what CMS you need (or may have already found the one), I’ll tell you why I like Drupal:

• the greatest advantage of Drupal is that you have the power to determine site structure
• also, it is quite very human friendly (thanks to response via suggestions forums and special usability studies)
• moreover, it is quite search engine friendly (URLs are crawlable, the text is automatically and semantically correct formatted)
• you can have literally anything: publish articles, have a blog, a forum, a shop, a classifieds section or anything you want: you can create your own page type and system with the right modules
• there’s a great handbook, a forum and lots of contributed modules (may as well apply to a couple of other platforms, though)
• Drupal is very performance-oriented: it works slightly better than Joomla, has a special “Throttle” module to stay through the heavy traffic and is well optimized internally
• you can run multiple websites from one installation (and with one or many databases)
• one can migrate from any other platform: WordPress, phpBB, etc
• all site sections, including a blog and a forum, will be integrated and shown with the same layout
• you can search through all the site with search (which won’t work, if you are using a 3d party forum platform)

Of course, there are more advantages of Drupal I missed, as I have only been studying it for a month or two. Overall, I can’t imagine a better platform to build a site on (and if I get time, I’ll move Improve the Web to it, too).

However, you also need to realize that you need to make sure the system will work for you and that you’ll learn to work with it. Otherwise, you’ll be in trouble.

So, I found it, what next?

After you find a platform to setup or test, you’ll need to read the installation instructions for the system, usually found on a highly visible place on the website and with the installation files. Typically, you’ll need to:

• download the copy from the CMS website
• unzip the archive to your local folder
• copy the files to your web server through a FTP program
• create a MySQL database, along with a user (with a name and password) to use the database
• specify the database path, name and the user login and password
• set the CMS settings, structure and layout as an admin
• start publishing

Normally, the whole process takes about half an hour (it is slow to copy that many files at once), but expect to spend more than an hour on your first installation and to read a lot on the website.

When creating your website, you need to remember to:

• plan way ahead
• go step by step
• gives your visitors a way to cooperate/communicate
• less is more (number of pages, plugins, links on a page, etc)
• quality beats quantity

In essence, it all means that you only need to do on your website that you need to do. If you want to blog, do so. But don’t start a couple of more sections on the website, then a forum and then another couple of blogs on the same website – let your visitors adapt to the changes and let your site grow steadily.

Rounding up

Though sometimes it is clear what decision to make, it may well be worth reading and reading more articles about picking a platform for yourwebsite to make up your mind completely. Only then you’ll be able to create what you want without restricting yourself.

Another moment to remember that if you can’t pick a platform, you can always run a test site somewhere (on a test domain or on your local computer with WAMP) and see how it goes. If anything, try another CMS.

In the end, it may be a matter of taste and personal preference. Let it be. Don’t worry about not following someone’s advice or your opinion being different from others’ – you need to make your own decisions.

Comments

“classifications are not passive ordering devices in a world objectively divided into obvious categories. Taxonomies are human decisions imposed upon nature – theories about the causes of nature’s order. The chronicle of historical changes in classification provides our finest insight into conceptual revolutions in human thought.”

It seems particularly relevant to me right now as, in the past few Tools posts, I have been dealing with the importance of hierarchies in web analytics. And a hierarchy is, of course, a taxonomy of how content on a web site is related.

What the passage above really brought home to me is how fundamental, in analytics, is the view we take of how content is related across a web site. The Functionalist methodology that we use provides one kind of taxonomy – but it encourages a taxonomy by page type not by page content. That’s extremely useful for many kinds of analysis – since, in our experience, methods of analysis are driven more by page type than page content.

But there are many times (and visitor segmentation is high among these) when a taxonomy of pages needs to be based on the content of the page not its function. As a fact about a visitor, it is generally much less interesting that a visitor viewed three Router pages than that he viewed three ‘Product X’ pages (though the first fact is not without interest).

What makes problems in taxonomy especially challenging is the fact that no single taxonomy is likely to support a very wide range of analytic problems. If, for example, I want to know what visitors who trade Stocks are interested in, I might need a taxonomy that classifies pages based on tool-type (portfolio analysis, stock finder, research, historical performance, etc.). But I might also want a taxonomy that classifies page content based on equity type or market (all pages about IBM, MSFT or all pages about large cap and small cap, or all pages classified by relevant exchange). There is no single “correct” taxonomy for a page about, for example, IBM’s performance.

Similarly, if I’m interested in the way visitors use on site customer support, I may want to classify all pages by Customer Support (and Support sub-functions or contact mechanisms) while leaving all other pages in one great bucket.

For a navigational analysis I might want to classify all my router pages in a single bucket, all my search usage in another. Then I’d have a wonderful way of comparing a visitor’s search usage with his navigation usage – an analysis that’s really hard to do on a large site without this kind of capability.

On the SEMphonic website, I might want to classify pages within our web analytics space by their topic – Functionalism, SEM Analytics, Conversion Analysis, etc. But I might also want to classify them by their purpose – education, sales or information.

The gist of all this is that there is no one single correct taxonomy for a web site – there are only taxonomies appropriate for more or fewer analytic problems.

Unfortunately, many – indeed the vast majority – of web analytic solutions don’t provide a really nice way to build taxonomies on the fly. Indeed, a fair number of systems force the taxonomy of the site to be set in the single most inconvenient and stupid way possible – the tag. Trying to get a good taxonomy through a tag is a nearly hopeless task unless the IT gods have smiled on you and your site happens to have a fairly coherent directory structure.

A fair number of organizations get around the difficulties of building a taxonomy in a tag by integrating with their content management system. This is, obviously, vastly better than trying to enter and maintain a taxonomy in your javascript. But while the Content Management System is not a terrible place to construct a taxonomy, neither is it the best. First, because handling taxonomy in this fashion will guarantee that you are locked into a single view of the site that will be in-appropriate for many analyses. Second, because the taxonomy created by content managers will often – even as an uber-taxonomy of general interest – fall short of what an analyst would prefer. Its organizing principle is almost always going to be navigational – and while a navigational taxonomy is at least sensible – it isn’t always the best taxonomy for analysis.

It is also here that Web 2.0 concerns (and, in fact, any kind of dynamic site serving) will raise their collective head; because dynamic content almost never contains within it the ability to use a directory structure as an organizing principle. In addition, Web 2.0 type widgets often cry out for cross-taxonomy analysis. I want to understand them as actions within a particular widget scope (user filtered inside portfolio analysis) and I also want to understand them as the type of activity this user does (user filtered in any view).

There really is only one logical place to construct a taxonomy – and that is in the web analytics application. It would be nice if the web analytics application could be passed a general purpose taxonomy (via tag or CMS as is now the case). But it’s even more important that the application be able to construct multiple “point” taxonomies that can be used for specific analytic purposes.

The application is the logical place for this because it contains all of the necessary information (there’s nothing necessary for classification except the page/event name). In addition, it is really only the analyst that needs this capability. There is no reason to down-stream it because no one else can or will take advantage of it. Finally, a GUI application is a great place to actually construct taxonomies.

The combination of a graphical drag-and-drop interface, ability to apply regex rules and the ability to create analysis specific taxonomies on the fly would be a formidable boon to web analytics practice. These capabilities would make it relatively easy to “manufacture” a taxonomy for analysis – a task that would be excruciating in a CMS or using simple assignment statements.

I think this ability might also go some ways to providing a rational mechanism for handling Web 2.0 constructs. Instead of having to decide what events constitute a “Page View” and which don’t, the ability to quickly create, use and drop hierarchies would allow the analysts to pick and choose which events to group in which ways. For one analysis, a Filter Operation might be included in the hierarchy of interest. For another, it might not. This ability to promote and demote elements up and down and in and out of a hierarchy of interest would allow Web 2.0 objects to be tracked (at implementation) in a fairly uniform low-level manner. The analyst wouldn’t have to worry about encapsulating the “best” set of business logic into the implmenation. Instead, every action would be tracked and the analyst could promote the actions as each new analysis warranted.

Why haven’t vendors implemented this form of taxonomic flexibility? The reasons harken back to my post on the limitations of OLAP – when you create a hierarchy on the fly you need to be able to de-dup critical numbers like visits and visitors. With the number of possible hierarchies being essentially infinite, it means that it’s quite difficult to accomplish in any pre-packaged data form.

But just because analysts haven’t usually had access to good systems of hierarchical classification and analysis doesn’t mean it isn’t important. While great progress has been made in the area of visitor segmentation capabilities, there is still great room for improvement in hierarchical classification. And I remain convinced that once an analyst has this capability, it will never be viewed as secondary again. Taxonomy, as Stephen Jay Gould rightly observed, is more than a dry exercise in classification. It is the very stuff of which our view of the world is made – and no analyst can solve any measurement problem without, at the very least, a basic taxonomy in mind.

Indeed, simply understanding how important taxonomy is to web analytics can help clarify many an analytic task. And even if your tool forces you to jump through hoops and take wild detours, at least you will be moving in the right direction.

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Gary Angel is the author of the “SEMAngel blog – Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru.

For anyone thinking of running an e-business, you have to give considerable thought and planning to the content management of your website. The web content management for your website involves a number of defined measures and schemes to optimize your site and your business.

Strike A Balance Between Content Management System And Website Requirement

The website can help boost the client’s presence and business over the internet. The content on the website needs to be in sync with the client’s products and services. The responsibility of the content management team is to pinpoint the most important areas of the business and emphasize those areas by effective use of copywriting and graphics. Here are the steps that the management team generally follow through the course of website development to satisfy the needs of the client:

• It is the responsibility of the management team to perform a postproduction review to see whether the content of the website will meet the needs of the customers visiting the site. So before uploading the pages, the content management thoroughly goes through the content once again.
• The responsibility of the content management does not end with placing the material on the server. The management is also responsible for updating the content to keep with the changes in the industry.
• The management should always keep their eyes and ears open to current affairs and make necessary additions or omissions as and when necessary.

Technical Aspect Of Content Management

• The creative process occupies a major portion of the content managers’ work. Yet they also have to have a good idea about the technical aspects of web related activities.
• They should also be aware of the several kinds of content management software that can help to enhance the quality of the output.
• One of the major responsibilities of content management is to make the visitor experience to the website informative and at the same time user friendly. The website should be easily accessible from any part of the world and capable of supplying the information the visitor seeks. The content management ensures this level of efficiency of the website.

So if you want to make your company’s presence felt in the cyber world, you have to focus on the aspect of content management. First be clear about the goals for your website and how you expect it to impact your business, and then hire a good website development company to help you accomplish your goal.

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Visit Susan’s site at
http://qualitycontentmanagement.info and
http://www.qualitycontentmanagement.info/web-content-publishing-management.htm
for more information regarding Content Management. You can also
find more articles on Content Management at
http://www.mynicheblog.info.

It becomes difficult to keep going back to your designer to get content updates on your web site and if HTML is definitely not your cup of tea then you should consider using a Content Management System also known as CMS in the digital world.

There are two options available to you when you are looking for a Content Management System. One is that you have your web designer create a Content Management System for you. The other option is that you pick up a ready-to-use content management system and make some changes to customize it to your requirements. Most small to medium sized businesses choose to use a ready-to-use Content Management System so that they can keep the cost of development within limits and be ready to use the software within a couple of days.

Most ready-to-use content management systems are simple to implement and require some changes to make it match your web site. Customization of an existing Content Management System can be done by your web designer and once this is done, all it takes to make changes on your web site is access to the system. Making changes becomes as easy as editing a simple Word document. Listed below are some of the web design elements, which need customization when using a ready made Content Management System.

Look and Feel of all the pages, which are delivered by the Content Management System. One of the first things which need to be customized is the look and feel of the content management system driven pages. This can be done by adding a customized header and footer. One of the disadvantages of ready-to-use content management systems are that they do not allow for unique graphical display. Most of them are restricted to certain layouts and color schemes and you need to conform to that.

Link structure or navigation structure. The link structure needs to be customized as per your web site and once this is done, you can just choose the page for which you would like to make changes to and do it with the Content Management System. The navigation structure should also allow you to add pages under a specific link as well as add a new link to the web site.

Administration set up for easy management of the Content Management System is required to be done at this stage so that you can assign permissions to different groups of people to manage the web site. You can also choose the type of editor (HTML or plain text) which you would like to use when creating the content and updating your web site.

Most people prefer HTML editors as they are very simple to use and are also known as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. Before customizing a Content Management System, you need to review the various modules available with the provider and choose the ones, which are most relevant to you.

Some Content Management Systems may also provide additional modules such as a shopping cart system, newsletter management system, user tracking system, advertisement tracking system etc.

Content Management Systems are sure to enhance the value of content as delivered on your web site and if you are tired of a web site which is as old and as the hills; it is time you upgraded yourself and got a CMS for the web site

Popular Content Management Systems for your web site Choosing an off-the-shelf Content Management System requires a close evaluation of the ones which are available today. There are two choices here as well: you can buy one which is well known for its quality of service and overall product quality is good or you can use one of the free CMS’s which are available. The problem with free or open source Content management systems is that you cannot be sure about the trouble shooting aspect of the work and you can never be sure about the longevity of the company.

Some of the popular Content Management Systems are reviewed below. Their technology usage and general information about them are outlined as well.

Drupal: Drupal is probably one of the most advanced Content Management Systems available online. It is an open source product and is free for download. Since there are thousands of people who contribute to the development of Drupal, it is quite updated and has some of the best community tools and marketing tools which can be found within a content management system. Thanks to its popularity, you will have no trouble locating a web designer who is familiar with this system. This is one CMS product for which you can be rest assured about support as it has a large online support network.

MamboServer: Mambo is open source software, which is very popular. It is free and extremely easy to set up. It is a scalable system and can accommodate simple web sites as well as large corporate web sites. One of the key selling points of the Mambo Content Management Systems is that it is extremely simple to install and use. Some of the features, which are available in Mambo are advertisement management, media management, content syndication, easy to use administration system and a multi-lingual interface.

Open CMS: You might start thinking that the world is full of open source content management systems. OpenCMS is yet another open source Content Management System, which is available free of cost. However, one of the key technological differences between OpenCMS and other Content Management Systems of their genre is that this system uses Java and XML technology and this makes it platform independent. OpenCMS developers believe that the system can support a wide range of web sites and is also suitable for large corporate applications.

Joomla!: One does wonder about the inspiration behind the various names of the Content Management System. Joomla! is one such application which is a high powered Content Management System which is available free of cost and is becoming quite popular with the development community. The product is available on the open source platform and is quite sturdy. Joomla! Is actually a continuation of the Mambo CMS system and the team originally designed Mambo before resigning from there en masse.

Typo3: Typo 3 focuses on providing an open source content management system, which is completely designed for corporate intranet and enterprise level applications. It is one of the most professional open source content management systems and addresses soft issues such as branding, version control and even maintaining templates within an application. Typo3 is currently available free of cost but it will not be long before such advanced content management system companies are purchased by a large software company. You only need to pay for the customization and you can be rest assured that Typo3 will help deliver your web site content effectively.

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For every free open source content management system, there is a content management system which is available on a paid basis. The choice of the right CMS should be governed by your requirement and your budget.

One of the most established needs in today’s computing world is the need for content management, particularly, a Content Management System (CMS). With its rich set of features and flexibility, WordPress can be customized into a major CMS.

Content Management System

Content management can be described as the process of creating, managing and publishing online content sans any programming or technical skills. If used properly, content management saves time and money. Effective content management can be attained by utilizing a content management system.

A content management system is a web-based application connected to a database that allows users to update a website without having to know any HTML (Hypertext Markup Language, standard language with which all web pages are built). It is software used to manage websites and web content. A CMS facilitates the maintenance of content but not the design on a website.

Without a CMS, updating a website say, posting a new article would involve manually changing the home page and archives and creating a new page from scratch for the article itself. Coupled with this, if a user wants other pages to link to the article like a list of current articles in the sidebar of pages, he has to change all these manually as well.

With a CMS, a user just logs in and adds the article heading to a specific category. He then enters the content and ends by selecting some tags to describe the article. The CMS will automatically put the title, date and the first paragraph on the home page. He then constructs a new page for the article and adds the article to an archive by date and category.

As can be gleamed, CMS does away with inconvenient manual tasks and streamlines the updating process. A CMS manages content efficiently from the time of creation to publication. A content management system establishes a definitive approach to effectively publish, store and organize content for the users.

Content management systems offered by different vendors have varied benefits and functions that a user can select from according to his needs. A CMS can be expensive or absolutely free like WordPress. It really depends on how complex the site is and what needs to be done.

Most blogging software programs are considered a particular type of CMS. They have CMS features for creating and maintaining a blog. They make publishing on the Internet as easy as writing an article, giving it a title and setting it up under one or more categories. Basic blogging software provides an interface where a user can work in an intuitive manner while the blogging software handles the presentation and publication. A blogger gets to concentrate on writing and the blogging tool functioning as a content management system takes care of the rest of the site operation. WordPress is an example of blogging software.

WordPress – An Overview

WordPress is a well-structured personal publishing system written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor, a popular open source server-side scripting language constructed specially for integration with HTML available in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) and backed by MySQL (open source Structured Query Language database implementation). WordPress is licensed under General Public License (GPL) and is available for free. WordPress started in 2001. Since then, it has grown to be the biggest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, utilized on a multitude of sites. WordPress focuses on ease of use, speed and a wonderful user experience. It is an open source program. Hundreds of people all over the globe are working on it. It offers a service in http://WordPress.com that lets a user get started with a free WordPress-based blog in seconds.

WordPress is an advanced blogging software program that provides a sophisticated set of features. Via its administration panels, a user can set options for the presentation of his blog and be published on the Internet instantly. WordPress focuses on aesthetics, web standards and usability.

WordPress as a Content Management System

A distinct characteristic of a CMS is that it singles out content from presentation. Content consists of text, images or other information shared in posts. This is separate from the structural design of a site which provides the foundation into which the content is inserted and the presentation of a site which involves graphic design. Content is stored in a database. A user can change the look of a site with a few changes to style sheets such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and other layout features that define the font styles and sizes, colors, backgrounds and positions. In like manner, WordPress stores content in a database and the WordPress Theme (layout/design) controls the look of how the content is displayed.

A CMS has control over what content shows up and where ads, related posts, comments and other interactive elements appear on a web page. But with the plug-ins and add-ons available in WordPresss, a user can also add these features to his blog. A user can turn WordPress into a full-fledged CMS with the many options, customizations and controls accessible to him.

There are a number of options a user can use to make WordPress works like a CMS. Most CMS sites control what articles appear on the front page. In WordPress, a user can make use of the Semiologic Opt-in FrontPage Plug-in that lets him choose which post will appear on his front page. Podcasting, videoblogging, adding music and images are possible with WordPress. There are plenty of elements that a user can add to WordPress to enhance connectivity and functions. Signing up for mailing lists, newsletters and other information to be disseminated can be done with WordPress. A user can even set up e-commerce with WordPress. Adding ads to a WordPress site is as simple as placing the ad information into the proper template file. Forums and bulletin boards are integrated with WordPress. Every WordPress user has a role that determines his rights within the application. This is particularly useful to control the flow of certain content. Another valuable feature of WordPress is its built-in moderation feature. This allows the user to approve messages before they get posted. The WP-ShortStart Plug-in renders Statistic monitoring. Lastly, a user’s CMS site won’t be complete without a way to handle external and internal links. WordPress has a number of plug-ins that can be used for this purpose.

Simply put, WordPress has sophisticated features that make it a powerful content management system.

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You would enter the content of a website in a database using a user friendly Admin Panel and this would update itself on the actual website. CMS is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet.

The need

Static websites are easy to design but hard to maintain. You have created a static website with desired content and you put in efforts to promote that site. As a result, the website grows organically over time, and while it is very useful, it is far from perfect. The search engines give more importance to the websites which are updated regularly.

To update the site content on regular basis, you would require the web professional company to give you continuous support. Now this dependency leads to either continuous expenses or a poorly update site.
Thankfully, this dependency is what a content management system is specifically designed to solve.

What is a Web-Based CMS ?

A web-based content management system (CMS) helps you manage the content data on the website. The management includes creation, updating, distribution, publishing, and discovery of content. And it is not the only thing that the CMS can do for you. The CMS now helps to generate new pages, categorize the content, manage the layout and presentation of the site, manage users and permissions for the site, manage other dynamic modules on the site and many other things using a very user-friendly Admin Panel which requires minimal or no technical expertise.

Features and Benefits

There are a wide range of features and benefits that can be achieved by implementing a CMS, including:

Create and Manage New Pages

Manage site navigation and meta content

Assign users to manage the content in a decentralized way.

Manage site layout and presentation by editing the HTML.

Manage other modules on the site. Like if you have a forum installed on the site, you can manage the forum preferences, settings, categories, forums, and users from the Admin panel.

Better consistency

Increased security

Reduced duplication of information

Reduced site maintenance costs

Out of all the features, content management remains the mainstay of the CMS sites.

Content management

The CMS-based sites have a front end which are for the public, a database which stores the vital data of your site and an Admin Panel to manage the site. Through the Admin Panel, you can create content pages like you are creating a document in MS Word. This is a completely non-technical interface to create new pages or update existing pages without any knowledge of HMTL, javascript or programming language.

You can simply click create pages and a page opens, which asks you to define the attributes of the page like Title of the page, Link Title for the frontend navigation menu and page content. The page content box uses a WYSIWYG editor which helps you to improve the presentation of the page like making any text bold, colored or creating hyperlinks. You can also upload images with your content. You can also define the meta tags for the page, publish an expiration date, author information, etc. to make the page more meaningful. Once a page has been created, it is saved into the database on the server. This stores all the content of the site, along with the other supporting details.

The CMS also helps you to make the content management an interactive process between you and your users. A similar page can be accessible to your users who can post the content like articles, news or events. The added content pages can be accessed through the Admin Panel and approved to be published on the site.

CMS Availability

There are various CMS options with different capabilities and strengths in the market to choose from. Depending on your business requirements, you can have a customized CMS based website or you can choose any open source CMS available like Drupal, Xoops, mambo, Joomla, Typo3 etc.

Every organisation has a unique set of requirements for a content management system, and there is no solution that can fit your needs. By allocating sufficient time and resources, you can achieve the best possible solution. Out of customized and open source CMS, I would advice to evaluate the open source CMS available and get it customized to your needs by any company specializing in Open Source solutions like Dyanmic Intel.

Now the common question is Won’t my CMS site look like all the rest if I use an Open Source solution?

It doesn’t have to! Most quality content management systems will allow you to apply templates and plug-ins to your site, which can set the design of your site apart from others using the same engine by nearly anything that HTML and CSS can do. Typically, you can find templates on the main web site for the content management system you’ve chosen – and in the rare event that this is not the case, templates are typically no more than a Google search away. Most systems which let you install a custom skin will even let you design your own; allowing you to make your new site virtually as personalized as any site on the web can be.

Conclusion

Content management systems are now no longer new to the market and have been established as the most important part of your presence on the internet. Now CMS based websites can create SEO friendly pages and be managed by various users across the world. I have provided the basics of a Content Management System in this article. If you want to read more on CMS like evaluating CMS etc, use our article directory Pacific Articles.

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Shakir Husein is the CEO of Dynamic Intel, an Application Development Company based in US. Dynamic Intel is recognized as experts in building customized eBusiness Infrastructures. Dynamic Intel also designs web-based solutions for small to mid sized companies including cost effective Content Management Systems and Ecommerce solutions. Shakir can be contacted at info@dynamicintel.com

The first thing I had to do was select our new e-commerce provider. Simple, right? Not quite. We’re talking about a major investment.

I embarked on a massive research project that spanned almost an entire year, comparing solutions as I evaluated everything from order fulfillment to inventory control to the subject at hand: Content Management Systems.

If you’re considering migrating to a new CMS platform, here are some things you should keep in mind (or perhaps avoid at all costs – as your friendly SEO advisor, I’m begging you):

1. Will my web site have dynamic or static pages?

Many search engines have difficulty spidering dynamic pages where the URL is always changing, and some engines also won’t index URLs that contain multiple dynamic characters, such as the “?” character.

2. Does your CMS attach session IDs to web site pages?

Session IDs create confusing URLs that are not only hard for search engines to follow, but can also lead to duplicate content issues.

3. Will every page on my web site be unique, or will content be duplicated across different categories?

Be sure that your CMS uses a flexible category structure where if you need to include a page in more than one category, it doesn’t create multiple copies of it (search engines don’t like duplicate content).

4. Do you allow custom title, meta, and headline tags for each page?

Believe it or not, many CMS programs don’t have this essential capability.

5. What can and can’t I change on my own?

Be aware of how much flexibility you really have when it comes to adding or changing content. Can you create static pages at your leisure? What about adding or removing categories, or having full control over directory and file names?

6. What’s the navigational structure like?

If your web site navigation is contained within Flash or Javascript, search engines won’t be able to follow links to any of your internal site pages.

7. Will the site be written in frames or Flash?

Similar to #6, websites that use frames or are written 100% in Flash have a nasty side effect of being largely invisible to search engines, except in these cases it’s not only the navigation – it’s the entire site.

8. How “clean” are the pages?

Search engines like pages that are simple and easy to follow. Be sure that your CMS doesn’t spew out bloated pages full of complicated scripts and style commands that eclipse your web site copy.

9. Could global updates overwrite individual page content?

We have seen some CMS platforms employ global updates with a nasty side effect of overwriting entire portions of a webpage (including actual on-page and meta copy).

10. Does any of this cost extra?

Many times a provider will say “sure, we can do that”, but will fail to mention the added cost. I’ve seen it happen, so the moral is to leave no stone uncovered.

Of course, these above issues relate largely to SEO. Although I don’t have time to go into other areas you’d want to consider, I can however offer two additional tips:

11. Document *everything*.

Make an exhaustive spreadsheet (and I mean exhaustive), listing what each solution needs to provide down to the most minute detail. Use this as a measuring stick against each and every platform you consider. You’ll be adding to this every day.

12. Put it in the contract.

If you’re not sure what is or isn’t included with a service, never assume, even if you have a verbal agreement. Request it to be added to the contract in writing.

In the name of facilitating friendlier search engine design for websites everywhere, I hope these brief tips have helped. Hang in there, and good luck!

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Oneupweb is the only two-time winner of the ClickZ award for “Best Search Engine Engine Marketing Firm”. StraightUpSearchs blog authors include experts from Oneupwebs natural SEO, pay-per-click campaign management, research, marketing, design, and sales departments.

Dr Thierry Barsalou of Ipsen (all the way from Paris, France)

Rod Boothby who is creating an internal system for Ernst and Young.

Interestingly, both speakers said they did not ‘sell’ the idea as a blog.

Both made the point that we operate in an increasingly competitive environment, we have new ideas breathing down our necks and the only survival mechanism is knowing what others are doing, communicating better and faster and constant innovation.

Ipsen is using blogging as a reputation management and competitive intelligence tool. Sounds a lot like Brand Tracker.

They use RSS Feeds to pull in data and scan blogs, forums, news etc. Then the team of editors analyzes the info and writes 10 – 20 articles each day based on their findings.

They are getting a wider and wider audience reading the blog and using the data to produce better results.

E&Y are using what they call “pages” and internal teams working on clients and projects use the system to collaborate and share knowledge.

There is a real need for collaboration and knowledge management in organizations today. A secure hosted blog system like Myst Technology’s Blogsite is one solution that could work well.

If it has to be behind the firewall then installing WordPress, with all the latest plug ins like tagging, would be a good solution.

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Sally is the author of Website Content Strategy blog: Information about the shifts in media consumption and the use of
technology in marketing and PR so business can stay in touch with
their rapidly moving audiences.

I honestly see very few websites that can really say they don’t need some sort of Content Management system.

However, not all content management needs are the same. There are plenty of instances where all that needs to be altered is slight text here and there, or details. It doesn’t make sense for the company to pay a designer an hourly fee every time they need an update, and it doesn’t help you to have to spend half your day working on pointless copy updates.

Here in lies the problem, most content management systems are not designed for small alterations. They are either custom modified code, where customers end up paying for development of features they are not even going to use (ie: the more complex functions they don’t need), or you end up paying for an off the shelf package that takes more time and effort to setup and still has more than you ever needed.

What I do to solve this problem is simply use server side includes. Server side includes are basically a line of code in a webpage that says “load this part of the website from this file.” This makes it extremely easy to update a section of the website that is just a body of text.

So as you are developing the website, sit down with your clients and ask them which paragraphs they want to be able to edit. This could be news, about us, past projects, etc.

Once you have found that out, store the text of each of those paragraphs into a .txt file in a “cms” or similar folder. You can then apply the proper markup around the server side include, and style it properly. For example,

Hello.txt in /public_html/cms

Hello, and welcome to our site!

Then in the index.html

<h1> <!--#include virtual="/cms/hello.txt"--> </h1>

Now all that has to be done to edit the heading, is setting up an FTP account that drops them in the CMS folder, and they can upload the file as needed with the changes.

The drawbacks at this point are that they still have to deal with the hassle of FTP. Don’t worry though, in part two I will describe how to make a simple CGI script to deal with that for you like I have done for clients such as Ann Arbor’s Hideaway Lane and Kingsley Lane Lofts.

The other drawback is server side includes also do put an increased load on your website, so it will download slightly slower.

The less server side includes on your page, the quicker it will download, and you can try and compensate for the increase in load by using proper code to reduce file size, and proper image optimization.

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3!

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Ross Johnson is co-founder of Ann Arbor Web Design Company, 3.7 Designs. He has been coding with perl and php for five years and counting, and looks to make the most cost effective and successful websites that he can for his clients.

The Web creates a wall between you and your customers. You cannot see them, you cannot hear them, you cannot empathize with them. At best, you get some cold, hard statistics about what they did when on your site.

Most web teams I meet are incredibly cut off from their customers. More worryingly, such teams rarely recognize how important it is to have regular interaction with their customers.

Your website is there to serve your customers. Everything must revolve around your customers. They must come first. If you don’t put your customers at the very center of everything you do, your website will fail.

Imagine if you managed a shop. Do you think you could manage that shop from 50 miles away by just looking at the statistics that were delivered from daily operations? Do you think you could know what your customers wanted from your shop without constantly observing and talking to them?

Imagine you are standing in your shop. It’s raining. A number of your customers are slipping as they enter. The mat is old and worn. What are you going to do? You’re going to change that mat, aren’t you? But people are slipping on your website every day. Because you don’t see them slip, you don’t see the problem. (When they slip, many of them reach for the Back button.)

It may be the Web, it may be computers, it may be technology, but it is still human beings who use the Web. Technology does not answer all the questions about your customers. Technology does not replace the need for good, old-fashioned human-to-human interaction.

Wal-Mart has embraced technology more than most companies. However, it has never lost sight of the need for a deep understanding of the customer. The more it has focused on self-service, the more Wal-Mart has realized that its management must-as its primary duty-be out with its customers.

“I never viewed computers as anything other than a necessary overhead. A computer is not-and will never be-a substitute for getting out in your stores and learning what’s going on,” Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, wrote in Made In America. “In other words, a computer can tell you down to the last dime what you’ve sold. But it can never tell you how much you could have sold.

“That’s why we at Wal-Mart are just absolute fanatics about our managers and buyers getting off their chairs here in Bentonville and getting out into those stores.”

If you manage a website, being with your customers is not a luxury. It is the foundation upon which web success is built. Others on the team may well focus on the code, but unless management focuses on the customer, the end-result will always be inferior.

Wal-Mart managers spend at least three days a week out at the stores. A web manager for an intranet should be spending at least three days a week with staff. A web manager for a government website should be spending at least three days a week with citizens. A university web manager should be spending at least three days a week with students. What else is more important?

For your web content management solution, contact Gerry McGovern http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

Subscribe to his New Thinking Newsletter: subscribe@gerrymcgovern.mailer1.net