Content Management (CMS)

Having a CMS for your web site has become very cost effective and something for everyone to consider, even for the simplest sites. A CMS basically has two major advantages. One, it provides a user friendly back end. This will allow you and those you work with to make updates and manage most aspects of your website without any special skills. You are then freed from depending on someone else to make critical and timely updates.

Another benefit is that they are a framework with many  features built in (or readily available) that would ordinarily take a lot of work to create. A few of these features include user registration, blogs, e-commerce, forums, events calendars, RSS feeds and a lot more. Using a framework requires substantially less time to achieve the same results as a normal website.

The CMS I normally work with is Joomla! 1.5. It is open source, meaning there is no cost to use it. For those of you familiar with Joomla, this is complete rewrite of the older version and is now very modern, professional and secure. The code is W3C XHTML compliant and it is continually updated by a large, active community with excellent support.

Does it have to look like a cookie cutter portal type site? No, not at all. It can look like absolutely anything. I am an experienced Joomla designer who is able to fully customize all aspects of the appearance. For those with budget concerns, there are many excellent, low cost templates made for Joomla (http://www.rockettheme.com or www.joomlart.com, or the Resource Directory for more examples). All CMS websites come with easy to understand documentation that has been tailored to your site.