Benefits of a CMS Website
CMS stands for Content Management System, which means it’s an application that YOU control, edit, and manage the content of your website through a login in the back end admin. There are several Open Source (free) CMS applications out there. Here’s a listing of the top 4:
- WordPress is probably the most recognized and used. Originally designed for blogging, it’s evolved into a flexible CMS with optional plugins.
- Joomla is an award-winning CMS with thousands of extensions readily available
- Mambo can handle simple to complex site development
- Drupal
Each CMS has its own unique features and options for customization based on what the user needs for their site. Following, are some benefits of using a Joomla CMS, however many of the aforementioned CMS’s also have similar features.
Just Starting Out?
Probably the best part of having a CMS is that you can grow your website as your business grows. If you can only afford a few pages to be developed right now, that’s no problem! You can always add to it yourself or have your webmaster add extensions later on when you are more established.
What’s Included
Besides basic items that you need to run the CMS, you’ll also have some other cool features built in. These vary based on the CMS you choose, but Joomla "out of the package" includes:
- Poll – take an online poll right on your site and view the stats
- Banner Manager – manage banner ads and view hit stats
- Who’s Online - you can see how many visitors and registered users are online at any given moment
- Search – internal search tool for visitors to location information contained within your site
- Contact – a simple contact form
- Links – a link manager to categorize links you recommend
- RSS Feed – syndicate your own site feed allowing others to subscribe or display others RSS feeds on your site
Expansion
Probably the biggest advantage to using a CMS is the ease in updating your own site. Businesses are no longer at the mercy of their webmasters schedule and don’t have to pay each time they need something changed. Add pages, menu items, articles, components, a store – basically whatever you need in a matter of minutes.
There are thousands of Extensions available for Joomla. Many free, but some of the more complex are either donation or relatively affordable. Extensions can range from interactive event calendars, forums, online chat, to ecommerce solutions. Just click install, and configure away!
Foundation
Joomla uses PHP programming language along with XHTML, JavaScript and CSS. This means that these sites “out of the box” will pass W3C Validation and CSS Validation standards. Benefits to following and having a web compliant site include:
- Increased compatibility with browsers (no labels on your site like: “Best viewed using Internet Explorer”)
- Ease in maintaining site thereby reducing future maintenance costs
- Consistency in colors, fonts and overall look and feel of site
- Accessibility broadens your audience by not excluding anyone
- Forward browser compatibility – designed for new browsers, not old/unused ones
Templates
There are thousands of templates available; free, pay per use and template clubs. With Joomla’s simple UI, “test driving” a new look can be done in under a minute with a few simple clicks.
Stats
Tells how many times your articles have been hit so you can customize your message pertaining to what your visitors are most interested in.
User Interface
The Joomla User Interface is comparable to Microsoft Word. It’s built around a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) technology, so basically you can input the text and photos, arrange it and see how it will look live - no writing code or webmaster expertise required!