Design / Usability

Programs I Use on My Website. Part 2. Content Management Systems (CMS) Dr. Ralph F. Wilson , Web Marketing Today - May 4, 2010

Part 1 - Basics | Part 2 - CMS | Part 3 - E-mail

One of the handiest types of programs I use on my websites is a content management system (CMS). Essentially, a CMS allows the site owner to make changes, add pages, delete pages, insert pictures, etc. into a website long after it has left the hands of the website designer. It also keeps the menus and navigation system in synch with the changed content. It is a definite money-saver for a hands-on site owner. And while I know HTML pretty well, I find it easier to use a content management system than to add and change pages the old way.

Your web developer or designer prepares a series of templates, preferably using CSS and SSI tools as discussed in part 1. There'll be separate templates for the home page, the sectional pages, and the final content pages in a website. Each of these templates will bear a family resemblance, but with slight variations depending upon their role in the website.

CMS systems come in two varieties. They consist either of:

1. Static HTML pages generated by the CMS when changes are made, OR
2. Dynamic pages that are generated on the fly by the CMS when a visitor comes calling to your website.

I see no big search engine optimization advantage for one of these approaches over the other. Static HTML pages load a bit more quickly than dynamic pages, but there's not a lot of difference. Dynamic pages that have long, complex URLs can bog down search engines, but most these days are shorter and friendlier. Programs that generate static pages may be produced by any programming language. Programs that produce dynamic pages are usually written these days in PHP or ASP. A specialized kind of CMS is the catalog building system included with many e-commerce platforms. Such a system controls your product pages and integrates them with product types, navigation, shipping, pricing, and inventory systems in your store.

I've used InteractiveTools' Article Manager on wilsonweb.com since 2002 -- and have been very pleased with it. However, Article Manager is no longer offered , though I continue to use it and certainly don't want to change. It is written in Perl, uses a MySQL database, and produces static HTML pages.

CMS Builder

My current recommendation for small business content management systems is CMS Builder (www.interactivetools.com) from InteractiveTools.

I used CMS Builder as the underlying software a website for the church where I currently serve as Interim Pastor. My CMS-driven site replaced a website someone had built about five years previously. My son uses CMS Builder as the basis for most of the sites he designs for clients and recommends it highly. Since I had already had long experience with InteractiveTools, I didn't need much convincing. This company builds great software for modest prices and provides absolutely the best telephone support in the business.

CMS Builder provides the software structure and integrated navigation system for a website, producing dynamically generated webpages on your own hosting platform using PHP and MySQL. A single CMS Builder license currently sells for $199.97. The software isn't designed for absolute novices, but rather for people with some HTML skills. If you know a bit of PHP, that's always a help.

How CMS Builder Works

Here's how it works. You decide which sections you need on your site, each of which becomes a menu item on a left-side menu. For example, for a church site, sections would be About Us, Service Times, News, Missions, Ministries, Pastor's Pen (monthly articles), Contact Us, and Member Login. A small business might have About Us, Services, Products, Contact Us, and Articles.

CMS Builder comes with some pre-configured templates for the following types of sections: about, bios, blog, contact, link, FAQ, jobs, news, products, and quotes. These templates come with the fields that you'd most commonly use in each of these sections of your site, though you can add any kind of field to any template.

For each section you have two kinds of templates:

1. Index template for the page that lists all the webpages in this section.
2. Detail page, that provides the structure for each of the individual webpages in the section.

For example, my church site has a "News" section. Since churches tend to be event-driven, each week we'll post brief articles about the coming Sunday's sermon, announcements about up-coming events, etc. The News section index page provides a list of the articles in the section, with a title and sentence summary for each, and a link to the appropriate detail page. Each detail page will include the title and content field.

CMS Builder allows you to have an optional WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor for each field, so you can set font sizes, upload graphics, etc. -- all with your web browser. If you like, the WYSIWYG editor also allows you to insert HTML code you have prepared with a specialized web design tool.

SEO Friendliness

CMS Builder is quite SEO-friendly, though the basic templates they supply don't include meta-description and meta-keyword fields. For most sections use the "summary" field to display in the meta-description tag and the article headline in the title tag, though it is possible to tweak this any way you like.

The default webpage filename selected by CMS builder automatically includes words from the title, separated by hyphens, which will give you an added keyword edge when the page is indexed by a search engine.

Be aware as you're shopping for CMS software, that not all products give you the ability to make your site SEO-friendly. From a marketing standpoint, SEO-friendliness vital. A great site that can't be found is worthless.

Database Capabilities

One of the strongest features of CMS Builder is that it gives you an easy way construct a database-driven site. Including your articles in a MySQL database may not impress you, but consider these possibilities:

The default "jobs" template allows you list jobs currently available at your business. The template includes the following built-in fields: job title, job ID, department, salary, closing date, contact info, summary, and content. If you have 3 or 4 jobs, this is handy. But if you have 100 jobs to list, you now have a database-driven section of your website that is easily set up and easily maintained -- all from a web browser.

For my church site I set up a password-protected visitor care section that enables our visitor care team to track recent visitors (business people read "prospects"), with follow-up notes, calls, and contacts, so we can care for them well. Each members of the team has an individual username and password that gets them into the visitor care section -- and only the visitor care section -- so that can make notes when they make a phone call to a visitor. Essentially, CMS Builder allows you to build a prospect database with much of the power of Salesforce, without the costs and complications of that product.

If you want to build an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section, here's a tool you can use practically off-the-shelf. If you need to add another field for your particular need, it's easy. If you have a product-heavy site, your product database can live here, though CMS Builder doesn't include any built-in e-commerce functionality.

CMS Builder is a program I'd strongly recommend for website developers to use as the basis of most small business websites. If you're not a website developer yourself, ask your developer to use it in your next site revision.

Other CMS Programs

Let me comment briefly about three other CMS programs.

WordPress (www.wordpress.org) provides free blog software. I used it to set up a blog on one of my sites last year. I must say that I found the software quite frustrating to set up correctly, particularly to get the CSS to conform to my site's existing CSS styles. Despite my frustrations, however, many developers use WordPress to build entire websites with great success. The advantage of WordPress is that many free plug-ins are available for it that enable you to install add-on features with little or no hassle. In addition, WordPress software is regularly updated. With any CMS system -- any website software, for that matter -- it is vital that you update your version regularly, since hackers have been known to find and exploit weaknesses.

Joomla (www.joomla.org) is a very powerful, open-source CMS with many, many options. What's more, it's free. I have decided not to use this CMS platform for several reasons. First, there is no telephone support available. Because it is so powerful, it is rather complicated to configure properly for a simple application. On the other hand, you'll find many existing third-party templates for Joomla to choose from, as well as many plug-ins. Some developers love it, but I'm not one of those. I'd rather pay a modest licensing fee for a product that is updated regularly and supported well, than get a full-featured product free with no support. Time is money.

Site Build It! (http://sales.sitesell.com), developed by my friend Ken Evoy, is different from the CMS programs listed above. It is a quite capable hosted CMS platform, known for its business savvy and broad array of marketing tools, as well as optional e-commerce capabilities. As I've explained elsewhere, Site Build It's biggest strength is to help you build a business that is likely to succeed in actually making you money, rather than just helping you build a website. It's really in a different class that other CMS platforms. I strongly recommend it, especially if you're developing an online business for the first time or haven't experienced online success with an existing website.

Here's the bottom line for me. A Content Management System (CMS) is vital for building or redesigning websites in the twenty-first century. Though CMS programs require some careful work in setting up and configuring templates, they pay dividends for years to come in empowering the site owner to make changes and add pages simply and easily. Don't build a new website without one!

In the next installment about website software, I'll be discussing e-mail marketing systems that interface with my websites. Don't miss it.

Dr. Ralph Wilson is a pioneer in Internet marketing, beginning Web Marketing Today in 1995. At present it reaches nearly 100,000 subscribers each week. The New York Times named him "among the best-known publishers and consultants who preach the responsible use of e-mail for marketing."