Content Management System
Content Management System (CMS) is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet systems; they have the potential to dramatically simplify the maintenance of both websites and intranets.
A content management system (CMS) covers the complete lifecycle of the pages on your site. CMS helps create, maintain, publish and distribute web-based information.
It also allows you to easily manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to the users.
The Business Problem
You have a website, or intranet. It has grown over time, and while it is very useful, it is far from perfect.
The content & appearance is out-of-date, it's hard to find things, complex to update. Worse yet, you've lost track of all the pages on the site, what was on the site last week, or last year? You couldn't say. This could leave you in a difficult position if a customer sues, but there is little that you can do.
Thankfully, these problems are what a content management system is specifically designed to solve.
Business benefits
CMS can help to improve sales, increase user satisfaction, support your business goals or assist in communicating with your consumer. Some of the wide range of benefits that CMS can offer for you and your business are:
- Reduced costs for site maintenance
- Increased security
- Greater consistency
- Greater capacity for growth
- Faster turnaround time for new pages and changes
- Improved site navigation
- Increased site flexibility
- Streamlined authoring process
- Support for decentralised authoring
- Reduced duplication of information
CMS Anatomy
CMS fully automates the publishing of your site!!
The functionality of a content management system can be broken down into several main categories:
- Content creation
- Content management
- Publishing
- Presentation
Let's take a closer look at how CMS works;
- Content creation
At the front of a content management system is an easy-to-use authoring environment, designed to work like Word. This provides a non-technical way of creating new pages or updating content, without having to know any HTML. The CMS also allows you to manage the structure of the site. - Content management
Once a page has been created, it is saved into a central repository in the CMS. This stores all the content of the site, along with the other supporting details. Here, CMS keeps track of all the versions of a page, and who changed what and when. At each step, the CMS manages the status of the page, notifying the people involved, and escalating jobs where required. - Publishing
Once the final content is in the repository, it can then be published out to either the website or intranet. CMS boost productivity by allowing the appearance and page layout modifications of the site to be applied automatically during publishing anytime and anywhere. These publishing capabilities ensure that the pages are consistent across the entire site, and enable a very high standard of appearance.
This also allows the authors to concentrate on writing the content, by leaving the look of the site entirely to the CMS. - Presentation
The content management system can also provide a number of features to enhance the quality and effectiveness of the site itself. CMS will build the site navigation for you, by reading the structure straight out of the content repository. It also makes it easy to support multiple browsers, or users with accessibility issues. The CMS can be used to make your site dynamic and interactive, thereby enhancing the site's impact.
