No two websites are the same. Each one is built for a different company. Each website is designed by a different company. Each one has their own little way of administering the websites they create for you.
What’s a CMS? If you have heard of WordPress, that’s a CMS. So is Joomla, and Drupal. There are hundreds out there, I’m just mentioning the popular ones. A CMS is a Content Management Service. It’s the software behind your website that allows easy administration of the site. A new page is an easy addition, editing an existing page is just as easy. If you can use MS Word, then you can probably administer your own website.
Chances are some of us do. But a lot of us don’t. We leave that up to our web administrators that can have our requested changes up in no time, compared to us taking time out of normal business and trying to spend hours figuring out how to do a certain update to a page and then making it work, look pretty and be online when hit the APPLY button.
There are essentially two kinds of CMS. A customised one you may have spent thousands on. Or an open source one such as the previously mentioned WordPress and Joomla.
The key differences between the two are minimal, but vital.
They both offer the same functionality. However, one is easy to manage, the other can turn into a nightmare. One is free, the other costs a small fortune to develop. One is designed and maintained by a small group of individuals, the other is supported by hundreds if not thousands of enthusiastic people.
Do you want to guess which CMS belongs in which category?
The customised CMS, which costing more, will in fact make you worse off. Since it’s a customised solution, only a handful of people will know how to use it. If the organisation you used to build the website disappears, you are almost screwed. Finding someone who may be able te recover something will have a hard time as they’ll have to first figure out what the CMS actually is.
As a friendly alternative, an open source CMS provides you will almost unlimited support and a knowledge base to match. Chances are, any web designer will know how to manipulate the backend of an open source CMS. The purchase of an open source CMS is $0. Having to only pay the development fee for a web administrator/designer to do what they were going to charge you for anyway even if it was a customised website. The picture looks pretty bright.
So, when you’re thinking about a new website, consider an open source version such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal (the three biggest and most popular choices).