What is a content management system? And why should you care?
Content Management Systems (CMS) are software apps that allow the editing and publishing web pages and other media files. The system also provides features like user authentication and site administration.
CMSs are powerful tools. They allow anyone — even non-technical individuals — to build different types of websites effortlessly. In this tutorial, you’ll learn more about them below.
What Is a Content Management System?
A content management system (CMS) is software used to manage the content creation process and publication of digital content. Organizations often use content management systems to publish webpages, blogs, social network posts, wikis, and other types of digital content creation. One of the core functionalities is allowing multiple authors to work simultaneously on different parts of a single project while ensuring consistency across the entire site.
Why Having a Content Management System Is Important
A Content Management System (CMS) provides many advantages over traditional publishing methods. You’ll save time and money while improving the quality of your work. Here are why content management system is recommended for most online businesses.
An All-In-One Solution
The best types of content management application systems are flexible enough to let you do whatever you want. They don’t force you into one way of doing things. Instead, they allow you to build custom solutions that suit your needs.
So You Can Customize Your Website
A CMS allows you to customize every aspect of your site. This includes colors, fonts, layouts, and even navigation menus. If you know what you like, you can easily make changes to suit your needs, such as making your website search-engine friendly.
To Be More Secured
Content management systems offer built-in security features like anti-spam plugins and spam filters. These help protect against malicious attacks. In addition, there are free options for securing your site. There are even premium versions that offer additional protection.
So You Can Scale
You may need to find out what type of traffic your complex website will receive. A CMS allows you to scale up or down based on demand. This makes it easy to manage growth and improve the mobile experience.
To Avoid Steep Learning Curves
CMS systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, and Magento are online website builders that enable anyone to build eCommerce stores without coding skills. They allow people with no programming or technical knowledge to create and maintain a complex website. These tools let you create a site quickly and easily and even help you update it later if needed.
The best part about CMS systems is that they don’t require you to know how to write HTML or CSS. Instead, you can use drag-and-drop graphical user interface elements to build your site. Then, once you’re done building your site, you can publish it on the internet and start sharing it with others, creating seamless digital asset management.
For Collaboration
A Content Management System (CMS) allows multiple people to collaborate on one project simultaneously. This helps you save time and money because it makes it easier to produce high-quality content faster. Also, it allows you to create a clean writing experience that results in better document management and content delivery application.
You can even use a CMS to allow multiple marketing department members to edit and update your site without logging into separate accounts. For instance, you could assign some content creators or content editors to handle social media posts. In contrast, another handles email campaigns, while some would handle editing that would help in rankings on major search engines.
Allows You to Recreate Extensive User Roles
A Content Management System (CMS) gives you complete control over how people interact with your site. In addition to allowing you to add custom fields and customize the appearance of your site, it provides marketing tools for managing extensive user accounts, creating advanced user roles, and assigning permissions.
Cost-Effective
The cost of choosing content management systems over another option is something only some people think about. However, it’s important to consider because there are many different ways to go about building a site. For example, some platforms require plugins to add basic features like custom domains and eCommerce. Others are free and allow you to build a fully functional site without paying anything extra. And still, others charge monthly fees for everything you want to do. But, of course, a basic level of understanding of web development won’t just do the trick.
For Security
CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Magento, PrestaShop, and others provide some basic security features and extensions to help secure your business websites. These include password protection, login forms, captcha, spam filters, and many others. In addition, several options are available if you are looking for something more robust.
Some CMS platforms offer a dedicated security team, such as the one offered by CMS Hub. This includes dedicated 24/7 support and marketing teams, an enterprise-grade web application firewall, SSL certificates, custom CDNs, and SSO membership.
Comes with Custom Templates
Most CMS platforms have a collection of prebuilt templates to customize your site’s look. These customizable templates are easy to install and often include common features like drag-and-drop editing tools, image libraries, and even built-in social media sharing buttons. You don’t have to worry about writing HTML or CSS custom code; you choose a beautiful template, add some text, and publish it.
For Efficiency
CMSes are essential to every webmaster’s toolkit because they allow us to manage sites efficiently and effectively. In addition, they enable you to make quick edits to the sites whenever you want, whether it’s adding a new feature such as eCommerce functionality, fixing a broken link, or making some small tweaks.
For Blogging Opportunities
Blogging offers a wide range of benefits to businesses. From driving traffic to generating leads, establishing authority in a particular industry, and generating backlinks, there are many reasons why you want to build a blog or add extra functionality to your existing website. However, starting one from scratch is difficult, especially for those who need experience in basic web development knowledge. Fortunately, most Content Management Systems (CMS) offer built-in blogging functionality, making it easier to start writing and publishing content.
Common Content Management Systems
Some types of content management systems, like WordPress, are used to manage webpages across many different platforms. In addition, there are several CMS options available, including:
WordPress
WordPress is a popular content management system platform for building blocks of different types of websites because it offers many additional features for free, such as a user-friendly interface, and allows you to customize everything about your site. You might want WordPress if you want something simple and easy to use.
You can start creating a WordPress site today without spending a dime. First, download the software application and follow our step-by-step instructions. Once you’ve finished setting up your site, we’ll show you how to customize it with different templates, plugins, and widgets.
Joomla
Joomla is an open-source Content Management System (CMS). It is used by thousands of organizations worldwide, including universities, schools, government agencies, businesses, churches, NGOs, etc. Joomla offers easy customization, powerful extensions, robust security, and many others. In addition, Joomla is free and supported by volunteers.
Drupal
Drupal is a highly customizable CMS that creates sites for big companies and government agencies, including NASA. You will need web development experience to use this tool’s full potential. However, you can begin the code from scratch.
You’ll find a huge library of prebuilt modules and pre-made themes, plus over 47,000 custom modules and pre-made themes in the open-source CMS community.
Magento
Security is always important, especially when storing credit card information. Magento offers PCI compliance, which meets the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requirements. This ensures that your customer’s data stays safe while shopping.
Webflow
With Webflow, you can choose between using one of our pre-designed templates or designing your template using the web flow designer.
Webflow is a ‘visual’ content management system designed to help web designers focus on what matters most – creating great-looking sites. Whether you are starting from scratch or building upon one of the thousands of themes, we make it easy to build beautiful, responsive sites quickly and easily.
Ghost
Ghost is a free and open-source CMS publishing platform designed specifically for building static sites. Its main goal is to make it easier for anyone to build a blog or web publication without worrying about server configuration, database management, or CSS.
Ghost is a headless CMS that makes it easy to build complex websites. You don’t need to know anything about HTML or CSS; use the Ghost Editor to write posts and publish them anywhere. And since Ghost doesn’t require JavaScript, there are no compatibility issues.
Sitecore
Sitecore is a headless enterprise Content Management System (CMS). With Sitecore, you can build custom solutions tailored to meet your specific needs. Sitecore helps you develop, deploy, manage, and maintain digital experiences that engage customers across every channel—from the web to mobile apps to IoT devices. This improves customer relationships.
What You Should Look for in a Content Management System
Business owners should understand there are many different types of comprehensive content management systems, each with unique feature sets and benefits.
Some are intended for blog posts, while others are best suited for eCommerce websites with features for price tracking, inventory management, etc.
Specifics will vary depending on your company’s needs, budget, and resources. Here are some things to consider:
• How much do you want to customize the CMS? Do you prefer a simple drag-and-drop editor, or do you like having complete control over every aspect of your site? Does it need to have a user-friendly interface?
• What type of structured content do you plan to publish? Will you post blog posts, articles, videos, images, podcasts, etc.? A comprehensive content management system should be able to address them.
• Are you looking for something free or paid? What eCommerce platforms does it support if you’re looking for a free option?
• Is your goal to build a large audience or to grow your personal brand?
Content Management System Key Features
Most modern dynamic content management features include some combination of the following:
User Authentication
Ensures that only authorized extensive users can access the site. This feature ensures that no one else can see what the author intended to keep secret.
Version Control
A comprehensive content management system allows multiple people to edit the same piece of content without overwriting each other’s edits. In addition, a CMS offers revision control, allowing you to revert changes to your site. This feature is especially helpful when you make mistakes while editing dynamic content. For example, if you accidentally delete a paragraph, you can easily restore it later. You can also use revision control to create a temporary copy of your site that you can test before making permanent changes.
Security
One of the core functions of CMS is to protect against unauthorized access to data stored within the database.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The goal of optimizing a webpage is to make sure that it ranks high enough in search results so that people can easily find it. When someone inputs a keyword into a search bar, the algorithm looks at the text on your page and determines whether it matches up with what the searcher typed in. If it does, the page gets ranked higher in the results.
Analytics
Powerful integrations such as CMS Analytics provide detailed insight into how people interact with your site. For example, you can see where your audience is coming from, what devices they’re using, and even what language they speak. In addition, you’ll learn about the demographics of your visitors, including age, gender, location, occupation, and interests.
Multiple Publications
Content management solution systems are software platforms for managing webpages, blogs, social media posts, newsletters, eBooks, etc. They allow you to easily add, edit and delete content without learning HTML code. In addition, a dynamic content management system allows you to publish multiple publications simult