What Makes A Great Content Management System?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a term that the web development industry uses a lot and frequently without any explanation as to what it means. Simply put, it is a user friendly way of updating you website, without having to understand anything like HTML or FTP.



Many web design agencies have their own bespoke CMS, however there are also a range of "off the shelf" solutions such as Wordpress or Joomla. Content Management Systems don’t all offer the same functionality and some are far more extensive in what they allow you to do than others. Sometimes functionality is restricted by user level – so for example, if the website sells cars, the client user may be able to add cars and remove them but edit little else on the website. An admin user, may be able to edit the site more extensively including the template and html.



Here are the typical features of a well featured content management system:

1.)A internet based control panel. The vast majority of useful CMSs are internet based. This is ideal as it means you can edit your website from wherever you are. The alternative is a desktop based application but this has the big disadvantage of tying you to wherever the desktop app is installed

2.)Login – featuring a secure username and password to log you in to make your edits



Then ideally you will have the ability to edit:



1.)Template to make design changes and add tracking scripts

2.)Title tags, meta tags, and header tags, URLs

3.)Navigation

4.)Manage Users

5.)Manage Products

6.)Add and remove pages



Ideally the CMS will also automatically create the HTML sitemap and XML sitemap. It is also really useful if it allows you to edit the robots.txt file, as this allows you to tell the search engines which parts of the site you don’t want it to see.



For more information about Content Management Systems, Hannah recommends that you visit digital agency Sumac’s website