What is a website CMS?

Posted by Terence on 13 August 2008 in Web Design

Here at Bourn Design we've recently been giving the entry pages to our CMS a facelift, as some clients will doubtless have noticed. Whilst pondering the question 'Just another CMS', it's worth asking just what is a CMS in the first place, especially if it's one of those terms you've heard people mention without explaining what it actually means.

CMS, thankfully, isn't some hyper technical term. It simply stands for Content Management System. And what does that do? If you have a website you typically have a lot of useful information to put onto it that you need to get to your potential customers; this is your content. The Management System affects how you get this information to them, by providing you with a system designed for organising content.

In the old way of the web, the process typically involved building a new webpage for every new piece of information (assuming you didn't really feel like forcing your readers to turn away by trying to fit it all on a single page). Whenever a new page needed to be added, or a change was needed to be made, pages either had to be created afresh, or altered 'under-the-hood'. Whilst Word Documents for example were designed to be edited easily, editing web pages has traditionally been a more involved process, requiring specialist and sometimes expensive software which doesn't always leave the page underneath accessible to Search Engine Bots or people with certain web browsers. Then what happened if ever you wanted to update the entire site design? Suddenly changing those 200 pages of content to match seemed quite a daunting, time-consuming and expensive task...

A Content Management System replaces this need to change pages directly, with a simpler and more familiar Word-like interface. You worry about typing in the main content (your terms and conditions for example), and the system automatically worries about putting the website design around it. What if you want to add or edit a page? A few button clicks, and it's all done. It's what we at Bourn use for our own blog here in the office, and it certainly saves us no end of time.

Hopefully that should help clear up this mysterious 'CMS' term sometimes bandied about. If you're still confused, why not get in touch with us at hello@bourndesign.co.uk, and we'll be happy to show you what one can do for you.