Update Your Own Website with a Content Management System (CMS)
A question that our clients ask a lot is: how will I be able to update the website you made for me? MSLK responds: that’s easy, through a simple interface known as a content managment system or cms for short. This is often referred to as the back-end of your website or what the public doesn’t see. It’s usually a dashboard that is extremely user friendly. If you use Microsoft word, you can use a CMS to update your website.
Gone are the days of hard-coded websites, in which the only way to achieve an update would be to edit raw code. This was the norm throughout the 90’s and the first half of the past decade. You would have to pay the developer each and every time to make a change to your site. What a pain! Fortunately for you, the web has changed a lot since then. The power is now in your hands to create, manage, and publish your own content, all with minimal effort and at no extra cost.
Websites can be thought of as living, breathing things. They need to be fed with new content in order to survive in the competitive marketplace. If you haven’t updated your site in two years or more, then you’re in desperate need of a new website that is managed through a CMS. At MSLK, we work closely with our expert developers to choose the right CMS for a job. This happens during the site map stage of a web project in which we are thinking about the whole site in simple schematic terms while planning for future expansion. If you want to learn more about how site maps can save you time and money, be sure to check out this post.
There are many CMS’s that are out there right now. WordPress, followed by its popular competitors, Joomla and Drupal, are all open-source, free solutions to managing your website. There are also systems more specifically tailored to ecommerce sites such as Magento and Shopify. Best of all, these are flexible enough to accommodate for almost any visual design you can imagine. We always find a CMS that is tailored to the needs of the particular project and guide our clients to make sure they are comfortable and empowered to manage their own websites.
~Ryan Nussbaum