What Makes a Good Content Management System?

So you’re looking at setting up a website, either through a professional web designer or on your own. Unless you’re an encoding wizard and know HTML like the back of your hand, you’ll need a good Content Management System (CMS) to get the website working.

In this post we’ll take a look at what a good CMS does.

Firstly, what is a CMS? It is basically a piece of software that allows you to edit, change and customise your website, to make the site do what you want. If you want to upload a new picture, put a new product description in, add a link to a friend’s site or even update your company phone number, chances are you’re going to need a CMS to do it.

So, what makes a good CMS?

1. Ease of use – They need to be simple and intuitive, organising the website and the pages so you can figure out how to do what you want to do, simply and quickly. Basic things include creating new pages for the website, adding, changing and deleting content and pages and putting pictures on, as well as editing headers, footers, navigation bars etc.
2. Hiding the coding – a good CMS will do all the coding for you, you should never have to edit the HTML code to get a picture up. All the editing facilities – the text editor, picture editor (which should offer basic things like cropping, alt-tag customising etc) should be separate to the HTML coding, so a mis-click won’t wipe out all the important code.
3. Simple managing – The CMS should make it easy to monitor exactly what goes on the website. For example, if there is a blog section, the CMS should provide a simple way to moderate any comments to the posts so the website owner can have complete control over content on the site.

The point of a CMS is to allow anyone – particularly people who don’t know how to write website code – to run, customise and manage a website. A good CMS will take the pain out of looking after your website. Infinite IT Solutions offers its own custom-made CMS with every web package, and has the tick of approval from many happy business owners.