No More Static Web Sites!
Why Every Web Site, Even Your Business Site Should
Be On a Content Management System
By: Ed Lance
The Old Days
In the old days of the web (hard to believe the web has been
around long enough to have old days!), we put up simple web sites
with static pages on our web servers. Those pages showed the
same exact thing, every time, until we edited and re-deployed
them. We used Frontpage or Dreamweaver to create and edit the
pages, then transferred the files by some means (ftp, Frontpage
extensions, etc. ) up to the server. Each time
you wanted to modify your site in any way, you would go through
this process. Even if you just wanted to change a bit of
text, you would have to deploy the whole page, or maybe even the
whole site up to your server.
Applications like Frontpage and Dreamweaver are desktop
software applications. You would need to have this software
installed on your local computer, and have access to all the source
files for your site. What if you wanted to make a change, but
weren't near that computer with everything installed? Chances
are, the update didn't get done.
Over the years, web technology has grown tremendously.
Dynamic web sites (e.g. Amazon, or your bank) can display different
content (data) on their web pages depending on the current user,
and what they have chosen to see. These sites are really
software applications themselves. Applications that happen to
have a web-based interface.
Dynamic web sites such as these are often custom-developed
and very expensive. So there tends to be a decision made that
smaller web sites, ones that don't need much in the way of
functionality, are still created and managed as static web
sites. Site owners are still editing web pages and uploading
them to their servers as they always have.
The Questions
On the surface, it might seem like that's OK. But ask
yourself...
Is your company web site up to date? Really???
When is the last time you updated your content, let alone the
design? How often do you do that? Often enough?
How easy is it to just add a new page, or edit some text, maybe
upload a new picture, and have it displayed on your site?
If your web site isn't up to date, is it really serving you well
as a marketing tool, and method of communicating to your customers
and the world? Isn't that why you have a web site in the
first place?
If the answer is that your site isn't as up to date as you would
like, I'll bet the reason is because it isn't that easy to
do. Well I'm here to tell you that those days are over.
You can now have a web site that is easy to
maintain; add a new page, upload pictures, edit existing text,
etc. No software to install, just a browser. You can do
it from anywhere.
How is this possible? The answer: use a Content
Management System.
Enter the Content Management System
A Content Management System (CMS) is a web application, hosted
on your server, that in turn, hosts your web site. Instead of
static web pages created with an editor like Frontpage or
Dreamweaver, your pages are created by using the administrative
sections of the CMS. Each page has content areas, which are
defined parts of the page that contain the text, pictures etc. that
are the real content of your site. You can edit this content
easily with the built in CMS editing functions. Just
edit the text, save and publish with the click of a button, and
your site is up to date.
It's that easy. No software to buy and install. No
ftp settings, no Frontpage extensions to worry about, just log in,
edit, publish. No having to be an expert in HTML just to update
something on a page. That easy!
And your site can use your design. All the colors, fonts,
images and layout that you have that make your site unique.
(See the side bar on Design vs. Content)
There are many CMS packages out there. Some free, some
quite expensive. After a lot of research, we decided to go
with Umbraco
CMS. Umbraco gives us the power and flexibility that we
as developers want to be able to create great, content managed web
sites, without limitation. And it allows us to set up a site
that is very easy for you to edit and maintain. Oh and it's
open source. And free.
This web site is maintained on Umbraco CMS. I am typing
this article directly into the CMS, within a very nice WYSIWYG
editor. Did I mention it's easy?
Isn't This Expensive?
No. That's the major point I want to get to in this
article. We can set your web site up within the CMS in a
short amount of time, and the hosting cost per month is similar to
what you are probably paying now. The look and feel
of your site is preserved. So why wouldn't you want to
do this?
Really, there's no reason. There is no reason for there
ever to be a new web site that is built on static pages.
There's no reason a web site should be hard to maintain.
There's no reason to pay a lot for hosting service that doesn't
make things easy. There's no reason not to have professional
level capabilities with your web site that the larger corporations
have.
But Wait, There's More...
Being able to easily edit the content on your site is only the
beginning. Having your site hosted on a CMS like Umbraco
opens the doors to a whole world of opportunities for
you.
Want to have a blog on your site? What about a forum, or a
shopping cart? Photo galleries? Display news from RSS
feeds or Twitter? No problem. Those capabilities and
more are available to add to your site within the CMS. You
don't have to find, download, configure, troubleshoot, integrate
these functions, as you would if you were developing your site
yourself.
Need custom functionality? What if you want your public
web site to interface with back office systems to provide
information to customers? What if you want a membership area
of your site? We can do all of that. Our CMS platform
doesn't restrict us. We can use all of its built in features
and integrate custom functionality into one, great looking, highly
functional web site.
To Sum it Up
The days of hand editing static web pages and uploading them are
over. All web sites should be hosted on an
easy-to-use CMS platform. And this platform doesn't have to
be expensive or complicated. Our mission at San Diego Data
Pro is to banish static web sites and get everyone on CMS hosted
sites. And that's just the beginning...
Contact us today
to get your site hosted on our CMS platform.