Using a CMS
Sometimes, you want to be able to change the textual content on your website whenever you want. Sometimes, there are numerous people in your organization who need to be able to change website content. Sometimes, no one who needs to change content has a clue about HTML. Sometimes, your website has fancy features that require frequent updating.
Sometimes, your website should be built on a CMS platform.
CMS see * emm * ess; an acronym meaning Content Management System.
It’s a platform on which we can build your website, that allows you (or y’all) to manage (add, change, edit, move around, delete, etc) the content of your website.
There are numerous opensource CMSs out there to choose from, each more suited to a different particular purpose, depending upon the needs of your website.
Wordpress
Wordpress is my favorite choice for websites that have no more than 15 - 20 pages and can have the same template for each page. Wordpress is opensource and needs php and a mysql database to run properly. You, the user, can login at a special URL on your website to manage your content. There’s a built-in blog so you can create blog posts as well as pages if you want. Here are some of the sites we’ve built with Wordpress:
Joomla
Joomla is much more powerful than Wordpress, so I suggest it for clients who need a community website with a lot of content and a lot of fancy things they want to do, like have a calendar, forums, a photo gallery, and login-only content, to name just a few. Joomla is also opensource and needs php and a mysql database to run properly. There are a number of free and low-cost plugins available that integrate with Joomla, like calendars and forums. It’s a bit more complicated to learn to use, but is quite powerful. Here are some websites we’ve built with Joomla:
Drupal
Drupal is also best for larger, more complicated community websites that will have multiple users logging in, forums, multiple blogs, and the like. Drupal requires more customization than Joomla, but handles some specific tasks better than others. Drupal is also opensource and requires php and mysql to run properly. Learn more about Drupal at http://drupal.org.
Blogger
Blogger, as many people know, is not opensource, but is a company now owned by Google. However, they do offer blogs for free. If you need a website whose content is mostly static (meaning you don’t intend to change it very often) but you want to have an integrated blog that you want to update, then a combination of a regular static site plus blogger may be for you. Here are some sites we’ve built that use blogger for their blogs: