CMS stands for Content Management System. 

Content means anything from text to images to videos and beyond.

Popular examples of CMS's are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. I personally like Concrete 5 a lot!

Why would you want a CMS?

A CMS lets you make changes on your own to a website without needing someone who knows web design to do it for you. Coworkers or friends can also contribute content.

"It saves you money in the long run and enables you to make changes more quickly and easily to your website."

The Paper Analogy (Static Websites)

Imagine that your website is made up of blank pieces of paper:

  • When you want put information in them you'd need to write things down using a pencil.
  • When you want to change things you'd need to erase the words and rewrite the text.
  • God forbid that you'd want it on a bigger or smaller piece of paper or add in entire paragraphs or pictures. You'd have to do it all over again!

That's fine for a few pages, but becomes tedious very quickly.

The Screen Analogy (Dynamic Websites)

Now imagine you could use something like Microsoft Word instead and just add and subtract paragraphs on your website with the click of a button. Want an image next to some text? Easy. That's called making things dynamic.

Skippable pseudo-technical explanation (The Role of Databases)

Dynamic really refers to the site being database driven. This means that the information is held in a database and can be configured and mixed and matched in various ways.

Essentially, your site becomes like your computer screen in Word. Pages just appear to be pages but really only the stuff on your single screen is being updated. The pages are a metaphor for sections on the screen.

That's the basic difference between a static and dynamic site. You don't actually need to have a CMS to make your site dynamic but it really helps. It's the usual way people nowadays do it.

The Advantages of Add-ons or Plug-ins

Quick functionality

Many web designers and developers use a CMS to easily add extra functionality, called plug-ins or add-ons, to your site like blogs, forums, image galleries, videos and forms. This means they don't have to make them from scratch and the add-ons are made to mesh well with the CMS.

"CMS Add-ons can save you time, money and headaches."

Changeable functionality

An added bonus is that you can sometimes reconfigure these add-ons yourself to do extra things. For example, let's say that you have an image gallery add-on. It shows a bunch of thumbnails of images in three columns but you decide you want to have it show things in four columns instead. You'd simply find the add-on in your CMS and change it to show four columns. This would be harder or impossible to do yourself if the feature was hardcoded into the website using the static method.

"CMS Add-ons can empower you to make changes to features like forms and galleries."

Using a CMS can mean more Collaboration

If there are many people adding content to the site, you can also decide who can add or manage the content automatically, locking the general public out and letting some people edit content but not publish new content and so forth.

CMS's take a bit of care

It's a good idea to consult with a web designer or a UX (User Experience) designer periodically throughout the life of your website. The presentation of content that you have may be clear to you but not to your average visitor or the search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Well presented and organized content has a big impact on the usefulness and popularity of a website. Web professionals can point you in the proper direction. They can help you to shape and optimize your content for the web since there's a difference between, let's say, writing for a book and writing on the web.

CMS's do need to be maintained

Unfortunately, there are some bad people out there that want to use your website for their own nefarious purposes. CMS's should be upgraded on a regular basis to ensure they're relatively secure. This can require the services of a web professional. This may sound daunting but CMS's actually often have security built into them. A static website will always only have a basic level and is just as vulnerable or more so to attack. You'd still need the services of a professional in that case too. The professional would just have fewer options to help you.

A Final Thought

Although initially creating a site can be easier and cheaper using the static method, it can be harder and more expensive to run in the long haul without a dynamic CMS.

Shameless Plug

This article is the first in my What the heck is... series. I'll be covering SEO, Web 2.0, Open Source, Usability, AJAX, Accessibility, and much more in later articles. So be sure to check back each week. Or, you can subscribe to the blog by using the little RSS icon on the My Blog page.