Several years ago, when I was a sapling in the web design field, I was asked to build a website for an online video rental company. It was a painstaking process figuring out how to position tables (yes, tables) and cascading style sheets to get the page to look like my design. I posted the site and they requested t first round of updates to the site. Every time I started tweaking one area of the page, another area would break, at which point my heart would usually stop and scenes of my client smashing through the door with a shotgun would flash through my mind. I would spend up to a week in utter panic fixing something that, these days I can update in a few minutes.
Have my skills really improved exponentially over the past few years? I’d like to think so. But that’s not what allows me to build and update a website in a fraction of the time it took a few years ago. It’s the use of a solid content management system.
A content management system (or CMS) is an infrastructure that allows users to build a website with far less programming knowledge than ever before. There is only one CMS I know of that allows you to update your site with absolutely zero knowledge of HTML or programming. It’s called Obray. There are countless CMSs available today. Many are open source. The most popular are Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, and others. There are also e-commerce specific CMSs that are built for online sales, such as OSCommerce, ZenCart, Magento, and Opencart.
The tolerance for non-programmers varies greatly among these systems. WordPress is likely the easiest to install and use for a person who has little to no coding knowledge. If you want a website that is custom designed, you will always be wise to hire an agency or web designer/developer to build the foundation of your site. They will then hand you the steering wheel – the content management system – and let you drive your own site on the information superhighway.
To give a simple analogy, think of a CMS as a pre-fabricated house. The foundation is laid, the framing, sheetrock, plumbing, electrical, and such are all done for you. All you need to do is choose your wallpaper, paint, and decor. New wings (i.e. pages of the site) can be added with the click of a button. Just like updating your home, most content management tools will require learning a few simple skills, such as basic HTML.
As I mentioned earlier, however, if you have no desire or time to learn these skills, the Obray website management system is the winner. Obray is the beyond the cutting edge of CMS. It lets you drag and drop text, image areas and even video from a dock in your browser. Go watch the demo and see why it’s so different from the other systems I’ve mentioned.
If you ever have questions about which is best suited for your company, just shoot me an email.
What in the world is a content management system?
Several years ago, when I was a sapling in the web design field, I was asked to build a website for an online video rental company. It was a painstaking process figuring out how to position tables (yes, tables) and cascading style sheets to get the page to look like my design. I posted the site and they requested t first round of updates to the site. Every time I started tweaking one area of the page, another area would break, at which point my heart would usually stop and scenes of my client smashing through the door with a shotgun would flash through my mind. I would spend up to a week in utter panic fixing something that, these days I can update in a few minutes.
Have my skills really improved exponentially over the past few years? I’d like to think so. But that’s not what allows me to build and update a website in a fraction of the time it took a few years ago. It’s the use of a solid content management system.
A content management system (or CMS) is an infrastructure that allows users to build a website with far less programming knowledge than ever before. There is only one CMS I know of that allows you to update your site with absolutely zero knowledge of HTML or programming. It’s called Obray. There are countless CMSs available today. Many are open source. The most popular are Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, and others. There are also e-commerce specific CMSs that are built for online sales, such as OSCommerce, ZenCart, Magento, and Opencart.
The tolerance for non-programmers varies greatly among these systems. WordPress is likely the easiest to install and use for a person who has little to no coding knowledge. If you want a website that is custom designed, you will always be wise to hire an agency or web designer/developer to build the foundation of your site. They will then hand you the steering wheel – the content management system – and let you drive your own site on the information superhighway.
To give a simple analogy, think of a CMS as a pre-fabricated house. The foundation is laid, the framing, sheetrock, plumbing, electrical, and such are all done for you. All you need to do is choose your wallpaper, paint, and decor. New wings (i.e. pages of the site) can be added with the click of a button. Just like updating your home, most content management tools will require learning a few simple skills, such as basic HTML.
As I mentioned earlier, however, if you have no desire or time to learn these skills, the Obray website management system is the winner. Obray is the beyond the cutting edge of CMS. It lets you drag and drop text, image areas and even video from a dock in your browser. Go watch the demo and see why it’s so different from the other systems I’ve mentioned.
If you ever have questions about which is best suited for your company, just shoot me an email.