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August 20, 2007

Web Design: What are Content Management Systems All About?

As your website becomes more valuable to you and your business, so will the time that you spend working on it. At this point, you will likely be thinking about content management systems, and whether or not they can help you get the most out of your website.

If you find a good content management system (also referred to as a CMS), you will be able to update your whole site by using tools that will allow you to make changes across your entire site, as opposed to making them page by page. This allows you to change the menu, page bottom, side bar, overall site design, and other elements of your website with a single effort, as opposed to multiple efforts for each individual page. Therefore, while you may have been spending hours to complete a task in the past, a good CMS will allow you to complete that same task in a matter of seconds or minutes.

You will also benefit from a number of additional features in a good CMS, such as style sheets. These will allow you to get a head start, instead of having to build your site up from the ground. You’ll have elements already prepared that you can alter and edit to suit your purposes.

Again, these style sheets can be applied throughout your website, allowing you to make an across-site change in one effort, instead of having to create the code for each unique page.

Don’t worry about being limited by what style sheets have to offer. They are fully adaptable, so that you can use them just to avoid filling in the basics, and then turn them into something entirely unique that you can use for your own site, to make you stand out.

When you first create your website, changing it manually may not take up too much of your time. However, as that website grows in size and importance, it will require more and more of your effort to keep it up to date. A good CMS program may be just what you’re looking for to solve the issue.

Mark.

Posted by Mark at August 20, 2007 8:02 AM