Traditionally all websites are maintained and managed by web design professionals. The path is the business person identifies a need, notifies the web developer, the web developer makes the change, verifies the change with the business person, once approved the web developer published the change to the Internet. The whole process can even involve more personnel and time. For major website initiatives and changes, this process is common and useful to get the right people involved. For small updates, this process is overkill. Small updates might be a change to a calendar, a service list or even updating a picture in a staff member’s biography.
To improve this process and enable business personnel Content Management Systems (CMS) have been developed. CMSs provide a simple interface for anyone with basic computing skills to edit, update and maintain sophisticated websites. Now the business user can change a website’s content, calendars, add pages, change the entire sites look and feel and more. CMSs also benefit web developers. Now rather than building every component and every page of a website, the developer can easily add components for calendars, catalogs, shopping carts, galleries, etc. With a CMS, a basic content website can be online in minutes or hours. A full functioning ecommerce site a day or two.
There are literally hundreds of CMSs on the market. Many very good CMSs fall under the category of free open source software. There are also CMSs that costs thousands of dollars with large support and implementation plans behind them. And CMSs that work with a variety of existing software common to most companies such as Microsoft’s SharePoint product. For our own website and our clients, Verus Technologies has implemented the Drupal CMS. Many webhosts provide CMS installations with their most basic accounts making installing and using a CMS to power your website extremely low cost.
With Drupal we found have there are a lot of features already available through the existing modules, 100s of existing themes thus making it possible to create dynamic, low cost, easy to manage web sites in a short time frame.
