Why use a CMS?

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Content management systems (CMS) are gradually becoming standard technology for both large and small sites alike. Only a few years ago, CMS systems were generally expensive, inflexible, and not very search engine friendly. However recently there has been an explosion in the development of high quality CMS systems, both commercial proprietary systems and Open Source systems, making them far more accessible and cost effective than before.

One of the principle reasons for using a CMS system for any website is that it gives ownership of the site content to the site owner, making it easy and relatively cheap to add and maintain content, and allowing a site to grow and develop with the business.

Another good reason is that with most CMS based websites, major redesigns become much less of an undertaking. Most CMS systems are template based - in other words the data that forms the pages and the style are stored separately, and changing the look and style of the site can in most cases be achieved quickly and easily (sub-text cheaply!) through template redesigns without the need to modify the underlying data.

And these days, the cost of creating and operating a CMS based site will be similar or cheaper than a standard "flat HTML" site.

About the Joomla CMS

The content management system we use as standard is Joomla. Joomla is a very highly featured content management system released under the Open Source GNU GPL licence that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications.  It is based on "LAMP", the ubiquitous Open Source web server configuration: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and is consequently fast, robust, scaleable and secure.

It is a standard non-proprietary system, supported by a wide international developer community, and has a high level of standard features built-in, and a huge range of third party plug-ins available to suit nearly every conceivable application.

The Joomla system of integrated templates, components and modules allows for great flexibility of design, and the system can accommodate both sites with a high design ethos as well as more conventional layouts.

Content editing is web based through a secure back-office system, utilising WYSIWYG forms for text and images, which means no knowledge of HTML is required for content creation or editing.  A wide range of publishing controls are also available, allowing items to be prepared and published and unpublished automatically at some future date.

Included as standard are components to manage FAQ's, links, banners, news (including RSS content syndication), polls, multi-level editors, trash management, basic user statistics, content rating, user registration, and mass mail to registered users.  Common plug-ins include an advanced forms manager, events calendar, forum, classified ads, and online catalogue and e-commerce facilities.

Of course, as well as all these functions and features, Joomla is highly search engine optimisable - unlike many CMS systems which cannot be adapted for search engine performance, Joomla can be used to create search engine friendly sites, with natural page URLs, and custom meta tags.