With our small business web design service we believe in choice. We support the the two most popular Content Management Systems on the Internet, WordPress and Joomla. Both provide easy to use content management for non-technical users and are supported by a vast community of web developers world wide.
At Wi-Phye we understand that as a small business owner you have limited time and budget to devote to a complicated website. Our CMS solutions are geared to to simplifying the management of your website and lowering costs by leveraging the existing eco-system of third party plugins and themes to extend your website to meet your marketing requirements as well as your customer’s needs.
What exactly is a CMS?
The simplest definition of a CMS (Content Management System) is a software package that facilitates the creation, publishing, distribution, organization and management of online content. As you will learn, most CMS look very similar to word processing software, like Microsoft’s Word.
A CMS provide structure to how information, articles, video, design elements and images will be presented, it also provides all of the tools for populating a website. A content management system assists the business owner by providing tools for the creation of content, the publishing of the content, and, ultimately to archiving and storing that content.
Depending on your business needs and staffing, the content management system can be designed for use by a highly technical webmaster or can be so simple and intuitive that even the most technologically challenged editors can use it effectively.
WordPress, for example, provides an iPad app for end user to update their websites.
CMS: Management Tools
Of course, a content management system can do more then provide editing tools. A good CMS can be expanded handle any number of sophisticated tasks. A content management system can help with your work flow by providing a permission based system so you can delegate the tasks of updating and maintaining you website.
For example, you can have multiple editors in your business, individuals who are assigned to write content that will appear on the company website. A CMS can limit the powers of these individuals, giving them the ability to submit an article, edit it but, not publish or make any other changes to the website.
Once an article has been created, a content management system can automatically send out a notification to a managing editor, who then has the ability to change or update the content.
Your CMS may grant your editors the ability to edit content in the system, but not give those individuals the ability to publish the story online. In this case, the ability to publish will just be in the manager editor’s hands. Some companies will only give this capability to their legal department.
The content management system can also set rules for which individual can edit content on different sections of the website. If you have an ecommerce site, you might limit updates to the product catalog to your product managers. Similarly, if you have an “In the News” section, access may be limited to members of your marketing team.
Also, a CMS can used for image, video and advertising management. If setup correctly, most content management systems have the capability to allow for the addition and removal of images and videos from galleries. They can also be used to manage the ads placed on the website. Keeping content up to date is essential in the search engine marketing environment and having a CMS is a way to give your company this ability.
Compare Content Management Systems
WordPress
Benefits
- Suitable for websites of simple or medium complexity. Brochure sites, small business websites, blogs and other types of professional websites.
- Easy to set up.
- Excellent SEO capabilities.
- Massive community of developer extend and support it through themes, plugins and core code.
- Open Source, free to use, widely available and widely used across the web.
- Can easily be extended for simple commerce sites.
- Most popular CMS. 20% of all new websites are powered by WordPress.
Joomla
Benefits
- Suitable for larger professional websites.
- Provides greater control of what content is displayed on each page.
- Open Source, free to use, widely available and widely used across the web.
- Supports multiple languages (namely localization)
- Can be extended through third party plugin.
- E-Commerce capable.
- Second most popular CMS.
When you contact Wi-Phye, we will help you choose which CMS meets your requirements and fits your goals.
If you wish to find out more about either of these Content Management Systems and how we can help design a web site for your organization, please contact us.