A CMS can both make your work with your website easier and add features that both you and your visitors can benefit from.
What exactly is a CMS?
CMS stands for Content Management System and is an information system that can manage and publish different types of information content. CMS is often mistakenly used as a synonym for Web Content Management System (WCMS) but includes more areas than WCMS.
Among the different content management systems available, there are both open(open source) and commercial (with an initial cost and annual fee). Among the open systems available, WordPress is the largest.
Why is it important to have a CMS?
A CMS is a tool you can use in your work. In the same way that the screwdriver won’t screw the shelf together for you, the CMS won’t solve all your problems for you, but it will make it an awful lot easier. With a CMS, it makes it easier for a company to have a consistent quality of content on its website without the company on its side having to put too much effort into the design.
There are different CMS, but what they all have in common is that they are tools that aim to streamline your work. But what kind of CMS service you should use depends on what you need in your business.
In what ways can a CMS make your work easier?
A CMS makes life easier for web administrators in that instead of you being responsible for entering each new image, text and so on into the code, you let a computer system handle the management of the content. The content itself is stored in a database and displayed in various scripting languages such as PHP, Asp and Perl. CMS means that you cut down on a lot of manual work as the work becomes more automated.
Commercial VS open source CMS
Commercial CMS and open CMS have different advantages and suit businesses at different stages.
Commercial CMSs often have a start-up fee and an annual fee, but with this cost often offer great support and facilitated administration and hosting. Within commercial CMS, there are many simple rental solutions, but also CMS solutions adapted for larger companies. For simpler standard solutions, rental solutions often work very well – but these still fail when customizations are needed.
Commercial solutions very easily become very consultancy-heavy and it can be difficult to change supplier if you are not satisfied. In fact, commercial solutions that require customization almost always have a higher cost over their lifetime than Open Source solutions (See for example the study on total cost of Open Source products).
An open CMS can be tempting to use because it is free of charge. But the important thing to know with the free of charge in an open CMS is not that you completely escape all costs, although the total cost will be significantly lower compared to a commercial system that needs to be adapted.
With an open CMS, you can have the flexibility to fully customize the CMS to your business and the needs you have with custom-built solutions. As the amount of knowledgeable people in large CMSs such as WordPress is almost limitless, chances are there is someone internally who can.
TIP: Read our guide on how to make a good procurement of WordPress / WooCommerce
With an open source CMS, you can redeploy the money you would have spent on licenses to get more web for your money.
What words are used when talking about the web?
When doing a procurement around the web, it is always good to know how to express yourself. The phrase “the dear child has many names” certainly fits the umbrella term website. Words like site, web page, web site, site, website, web, platform, web platform, home page, landing page, internet page or home are all words that are used at one time or another to describe either a website or a part of a website.
Once and for all, let’s try to clarify and explain what the correct terms are and what they actually mean.
Website – a website is the term that stands for an entire website, consisting of different web pages. The website is the domain itself, the URL, which can then be followed by different brackets depending on what information the following pages offer.
Landing page – a specific page with specific information, for example about a type of product.
Web page – a specific page on a website, such as ‘home’, ‘contact’ or ‘about us’.
Home page – the first web page a visitor encounters when they enter the domain. Often described as ‘home’ in the navigation menu.
Switch CMS to WordPress without losing important content
Do you feel that the CMS you have chosen is not working for you and is creating more problems than it solves? You can switch to another CMS without losing all the work you’ve put into your site. By using a web agency that has knowledge of CMS and which is best suited for which company, you can make this change. Contact us with questions about changing CMS. We have good experience in moving from other platforms to WordPress.
How do I make WordPress a good CMS?
It can be difficult to know which tools to use when building your website, which are both easy to use and which give the best results. Here are various plugins compatible with WordPress that we can recommend.
Based on what you need with your web solution, plugins can offer exactly the functionality for the administration of your web that you need. So it is with plugins that you can customise your CMS to achieve the result you want, so that editors get the best possible user experience. There is no “right” way here, but the way you choose to go should be adapted to the capabilities of your internal organization.
A guideline is that the more advanced the editing solution, the higher the management cost you can expect to pay to your operations and development partner.
Advanced custom fields
With Advanced Custom Fields, you can easily customize your WordPress news site. The plugin is for editing the content of the page, how it behaves and where it is located on your page. Advanced Custom Fields is built for developers and requires programming knowledge to work properly.
Gutenberg
Gutenberg (Pagebuilder) is an easy way to write content-rich posts and pages, with functionality that previously required a deep knowledge of WordPress. Quite simply, Gutenberg gives you the ability to make use of all the hidden commands that exist in the cloud of WordPress features, but may not be easy to find. However, Gutenberg is a beta version, but is well worth experimenting with and waiting for its release.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a plugin that helps you optimize your content. This by getting more visitors from search engines like Google and Bing, can help you attract visitors from social media, as well as increase your visitors’ engagement and activity on your page. This is done with the use of keywords and helps your site to get through the jungle of search engine results. Yoast SEO is a plugin we recommend you use on your site and can be combined with the plugins we previously described.
We help you with CMS
Do you need help navigating the sea of web solutions? Do you want to build an easy-to-use and efficient system for your web, while working best for both your and your visitors’ needs? We are more than happy to help you choose the CMS and implement the system on either your new site, or your existing site. Quite simply, we create a flexible digital marketing platform for your business.