There are many situations where you need to or want to be able to make changes to your website.
As I said in my earlier post on Content Management Systems (CMS) there are also many solutions to this.
First of all, making changes to your website is a GOOD thing. A website that never gets changed gets stale, dead, out-of-date. Since we have web designers on staff, that makes it easy for us to make changes. In fact, we re-design our website about twice a year.
But what’s the typical business to do?
That depends on the type and frequency of changes needed.
1. If you need occasional changes, minor changes monthly such as adding testimonials or updating personnel, the best solution is to have a competent company that will promptly make the changes needed at a reasonable cost. That’s one of the reasons our premium hosting services include a half hour’s work on the site per month. Your site doesn’t get messed up, and if search engine optimization is important it can be taken care of at the same time, by professionals.
2. For online stores, the store part of the site should be a CMS, so you can change prices, add items, change shipping charges, put items on sale and offer discount coupons, for example. But don’t make the entire site a CMS.
3. If you need to have a calendar on your website and to be able to make changes to it frequently, there are lots of inexpensive software programs that will do this. Similarly, software exists for many other specific functions that might require frequent changes. These include scrollers where the pictures and links need to be changed from time to time, photo galleries, location search and site search functions, to name a few.
4. If you need to make changes rather often, such as text changes or adding pages similar to ones already existing, you can use a program called Contribute if your site was built using Dreamweaver (the most widely used professional web design software). Contribute is a sort of word processor for websites. It isn’t for the creation of websites. It is for non-professionals, clients to be able to make minor updates themselves while preserving the look of the site and pages. It’s inexpensive and easy to use. It does not, however, handle search engine optimization if that is a major issue.
5. If you have one page or a couple of pages that are going to need frequent updates, posting of news or announcements, tips or the like, a blog is a perfect solution. Good quality blogging software such as Movable Type can be fully integrated with your site, the pages optimize well and it is easy to use.
I was pretty critical in my blog posting about CMS as a solution to an entire site. The fact is, with the above range of options, I have never yet found a situation where a client couldn’t have their cake and eat it too. That is, to be able to easily and inexpensively get the changes they needed done, and still have a professional site.
Really, the only reason to build a site entirely in a CMS is where you just can’t afford professional services. And the only other reason is being sold a bill of goods by one of the many people out there insisting that their CMS websites are “just as good as custom designed sites at a fraction of the cost.” I’m sorry, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. And in most cases, the customer lives to regret it.
Like the Latin says, “Caveat Emptor” (Let the Buyer Beware).
