freshrnup - Web design Sutherland Shire

Content Management Systems: Keeping it simple

IN THE COURSE of the last 12 months there has been a seismic shift in the desires of my customers – whereas in early 2008 most clients requested standards-based web sites built to be web mastered, almost every customer is now requesting facility to manage the content of their site.

Hidden costs

IT’S BEEN a difficult path to walk, as I have a problem with just about every content management system on the market. First, they are not easy to learn to manage (no matter what the sales team tell you), which presents a number of problems, including businesses losing staff for the course of several training sessions – expensive training sessions. Then, when that staff member leaves, their replacement must also go through the same course – again with the same expenditure and down time.

It’s also time consuming to implement the inevitable upgrades and this can create considerable expenses again. The sites based on various Content Management Systems (CMS) typically cost several thousand dollars to implement, so all of these expenses on top of an already expensive site produce a considerable financial impost on a small business which is in effect only trying to buy an advertisement or a window-shopping device. Oh yeah, your staff will have to attend more training sessions when you upgrade.

Inflexible structures

MY NEXT ISSUE is the template system employed by CMS sites. It is crucial that your website be designed to reflect your business in a way that is appealing to your target market. Failure to do this is likely to greatly reduce the effectiveness of a key investment in the success of your business.

I can spot a template-based site immediately: it simply looks like the content has been jammed into a design which is entirely generic. This breaks the first principle of web design: the content must dictate the design, not the other way around.

By their very nature, the built in complexity of CMS sites also permit fiddling in areas where people who aren’t web designers should never go. The result are web sites which look like an amateur has built but have cost you more to purchase and maintain than the average professionally designed and webmastered site. Let’s face it: you are only going to look as professional as your web site.

An affordable, workable solution

INTO THIS scenario comes WordPress. WordPress is a blogging tool, designed to be incredibly easy to post to, but having all the functions which most websites demand. It has the added functionality of being incredibly flexible in nature, which means that it can be reconfigured to take on almost any appearance and structure that a designer fancies. View my most recent implementation. WordPress ticks the boxes which most small business are concerned with:

WordPress has the flexibility which enables us to build sites where the content dictates the design, so small businesses can get their message out most effectively.
It takes less than an hour to show a user how to handle every function and eventuality of maintaining a WordPress site and my customers always exclaim at the end of training “Is that all there is?”. If you can use an email system, you can update and manage a website built in WordPress.