What is a CMS?

We are proud to have recently built a new website for Kent's leading lighting hire and lighting production providers, STL Lighting.

An excellent optional add-on to our Websmart web design packages is a CMS (standing for Content Management System), but what exactly is that and why is it useful to you?

One of the hidden costs of web design are updates. Many businesses want to regularly add new content to their website, whether it’s a blog or news section, maybe new case studies or photos in a portfolio, perhaps even things like adjusting prices or amending contact details as they change. In all cases, you need to hire a web designer to make the changes for you who will usually have an hourly fee and a half hour minimum even if the update just takes a couple of minutes. Of course, this can get expensive if you want to keep a daily blog, especially for small businesses.

The solution that has emerged is the content management system, a special piece of software that makes it easy for people who aren’t expert website designers to log onto their site and make updates.

Interfaces vary but are typically quite similar to a word processing program, offering options for font sizes, bold text, image placement and so on just clicking a couple of on-screen buttons rather than having to write out pages of complex HTML code.

Here at Smart Domain Group we regularly provide website designs for clients through the Websmart package with a CMS called Contribute as an add-on. Typically we set it up so that the main web design coding and menu links can’t be changed (a few client mistakes leading to costly rebuilds in the early days!), but everything else on the page can. Images can be updated, news rewritten or added to, even blogs can be kept and all without incurring any web design fees.