Content Management Systems Overview

If you are building a new website from scratch, you may want to consider using a Content Management System (CMS) as the base for this. A CMS is a web application that is used for managing various types of content including images, videos, audio files, electronic documents and other forms of web content and digital media. These are often used for publishing web content on new websites as they allow for rapid website development and maintenance, generally offering powerful back-ends for administration, some even allowing drag and drop site creation. Most of the popular web CMS are open source, meaning that it won’t cost you a penny to use these, and they are very actively developed often with more collaborators working on a CMS than a commercial web app. Many of these have active communities offering helpful support around the clock for free also, and due to these points some very prolific sites make use of these CMS’s. Some examples of this are Ford (WordPress), The United Nations (Joomla) and MTV (Drupal) to name but a few.

Content Management Systems are suitable for both novices and experts alike, they are user friendly and far easier and quicker than for example developing your own site with even half the features of a good CMS. They are fully skinnable allowing you to completely change the look of a site, with a lot of customisation it will look very different to the default installs. There are many sites to download themes that other people have made for these also, and a simple search should turn up a lot of results.
Typical features of CMS’s:

  • User management with fine grain settings
  • Article versioning
  • Separating content from styling
  • Content repository
  • Extensible with addons
  • Fully customisable in style and layout

Here is a short breakdown of some of the most common and up and coming CMS compatible with our UK Web Hosting:

  • Joomla: Joomla is a Content Management System for building fully featured and attractive websites rapidly. It is the most popular CMS in the world, and we offer Joomla Hosting, which is Fantastico install enabled. It offers a shopping cart module and is suitable for online stores and document management.
  • Drupal: Drupal is the second most popular CMS currently available. It offers SSL support which Joomla doesn’t out of the box, and offers much better search engine optimisation features than Joomla. We offer Drupal Hosting which is Fantastico install enabled.
  • WordPress: WordPress is not strictly a CMS but a blogging software, however it is so advanced and customisable that it can fall into the same category. WordPress is the most widely used blogging software in the world, offering a great selection of user created addons. We offer WordPress Hosting, which is Fantastico install enabled.
  • Jaws: Jaws is a framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites. It aims to be user friendly giving ease of use and lots of ways to customize web sites, but at the same time is developer friendly, it offers a simple and powerful framework to hack your own modules. We offer Jaws Hosting.
  • MODx: MODx is 100% buzzword compliant, and makes child’s play of building content managed sites with validating, accessible CSS layouts. It empowers its users to build engaging Web 2.0 sites, with its pre-integrated MooTools, Scriptaculous and Prototype libraries. We offer MODx Hosting.

One major advantage of CMS’s is that they come SEO ready, allowing very easy optimisation of your pages, changing title and description tags for each article for example.