It is an all-too-familiar complaint in this information age. You visit a website and all it has is static, outdated content. You begin to wonder why?
Does the company just not care about their image? Is the company stagnant and there really is no new content? Is it too expensive to update the website?
When you boil it down, the most common reason this occurs is lack of IT resources. Let’s face it, maintaining a website requires some level of technical expertise. When combined with the fact that most of the employees creating content don’t possess that skillset, you quickly have a bottleneck situation.
This is where a Content Management System (CMS) comes into play. A well designed CMS removes this bottleneck by making it easy for anyone to create and maintain content on your website.
Here at Rockton Software, we investigated many of these applications ranging in price from free to extremely cost prohibitive (expensive). There are many various features in these products, and they are all not created equally, so you have to do a fair bit of research to determine which one meets your needs.
However, most of these products have some or all of the following:
– Database backend to store content
– Templates to control how the pages on your site appear
– Searching/Indexing/Versioning
– Friendly User Interface for entering content in both Rich Text or HTML
– Security to control permissions by role
– Ability to publish content on a certain date as well as expire on a future date
– Content Controls and the ability to create your own controls for custom functionality
Implementing a CMS does not entirely remove the need for IT resources since custom functionality will still ultimately need to be developed. However, this approach will pay huge dividends in allowing others in your organization to participate in the most common daily tasks of keeping your content current and relevant for your customer.
Click here to learn more about our recent updates to our website.
