Is content management for you?

I remember many years ago when I was working at a small design firm a client we were designing a website for was working with a developer who was creating a content management system. It all seemed so exotic – after the site was finished the client

could login and make changes themselves

. Without knowing code. Magic.

Some years later, and long after we should have known better, a company I was doing design work for enlisted the help of a development company to put together a site for us. The company used outdated tools to create a bloated, non-user friendly content management system at an approximate cost of $300,000. Ouch. Actually, the part of this story that hurts the most is the fact that after I had left this company and founded Luckynine Design, they ended up scrapping the site and starting over using a free content management system.

There is absolutely no reason for any company to make an expensive mistake like that again. With the popularity of Open Source solutions, free, easy to use content management software have become pretty common. These programs allow designers to create unique, custom designs and clients to easily update content and even add pages without having to search for a developer to overcharge for simple changes.

Advantages of moving to a content management system.

Pages are easy to add and update, even without any html knowledge.

All widely used content management systems, like WordPress and Joomla to name a couple of examples, offer WYSIWYG page editing through the administration panel. Non-programmers can layout their new pages using tools they are familiar with from using common word processing programs.

Site design can be customized.

Theme and template files (those files associated with creating the look and feel of the site) can be modified by designers and developers to create a custom look. Or, your designer can create a theme from scratch and integrate your content for a completely unique site. We are no longer constrained by pre-made templates, and can create news magazine sites, blogs, gallery sites, portfolio sites, e-commerce sites and anything else we can dream up to meet all client needs.

Plugins, plugins. Developers who work on Open Source software love to develop. By this time in the life of many of these platforms, particularly WordPress – our favorite, developers have come up with solutions to almost all of the bells and whistles you could want to add to a website. Easy social bookmarking, advanced search capabilities, Ajax elements, integration with Flickr, YouTube and other popular sites are just a few examples of features that plugins can add to spruce up a site. We usually tell clients who are looking for something that we have not run into before that, “We haven’t used that feature, but we’re sure there is a plugin that can address it.” We haven’t been wrong yet.

Content management platforms have come a long way, and no longer need to be limited to use primarily by bloggers. Sites can be developed in which blogs are secondary to content or not used at all. When developing your new website or redesigning your current one, ask your designer about the pros of integrating your design into a content management platform.