Why would you use a Content Management System?

Question

I want to help a friend manage his business site and I thought that a CMS would be the thing for him. But I’m not so sure anymore.

I recently discovered all this CMS industry and… sincerely… I don’t get it. Why are so many CMS solutions out there? Why isn’t there a definite leader on the market? What can you use it for? Why would you use it?.… and all sorts of questions that pop in my head.

I initially thought: man, this is cool, I install the thing, set up some templates and then anybody can add content to the site. No extensive technical skills required. This might be a thing for the future.

But is it really, or do you end up with more trouble than it’s worth?

Why would you use a CMS? What do you gain from using it? Can someone explain what’s up with this CMS thing?

I'm not sure if this is a community wiki, but if you think it is, tell me and I'll mark it as such.

P.S. A similar question has been asked here, but the answers are more of the "WHAT?" type. I am more interested in the "WHY?".

Thank you.

Answer 1

Can your friend write HTML, and build a web page by hand?

Then he may be better off without a CMS. I tend to set up static sites myself when the requirements are very simple.

If he can't, or he doesn't want to be the guy updating the site, he's almost always better off with a CMS, as he won't have to depend on outside people to update his page for him. Which is the main "WHY?" for CMS'es in a nutshell, apart from technical aspects like that they eliminate repetitive tasks that are common to all web sites, like template management, layout, navigation, caching and so on.

The main points from the client's point of view:

• Lower maintenance costs because non-programmers can edit the site
• Lower "latency", content can be posted immediately
• Platform independency, with most CMSes a browser is enough, no special applications and tools are needed (like FTP clients); Editing is possible from multiple locations
• More independence from the person/company who created the site if the CMS is a well-known one
• Enhanced security using separate accounts for managing the site, something that is impossible to achieve in a HTML Editor / FTP setup on most providers

Answer 2

You should use a CMS whenever you want to manage content. Lots of content, preferably.

I once wrote a blog-post about why a CMS is rarely a good idea.

A case when a CMS is good without the need to manage lots of content is when a company has specialized in using a particular CMS - it has already walked the learning curve - and it makes small-to-medium websites very fast, reusing all the goodies that are present and that it has created internally.

But to start using a CMS for a small web-site - definitely no.

Answer 3

From what I can tell you have answered your own question: "I initially thought: man, this is cool, I install the thing, set up some templates and then anybody can add content to the site. No extensive technical skills required. This might be a thing for the future."

Especially in larger organizations, you would not want to burn developer time having programmers update content. You also don't want to give creative marketing people access to the system. Enter...CMS. From my experience is is more trouble than it is worth in small business or websites.

Answer 4

I think you have hit many of the reasons on the head in your question.

A lot of people decide to use a CMS to generate a professional looking website without much of the technical know how. It also allows for rapid generation of content and also provides many useful tools out of the box. Also there is a large community attached with many of the popular content management systems which will provide support if any problems are encountered.

For people with the technical knowledge and the time to develop a bespoke website/system they could provide more hassle than needed as it is unlikely they will provide all the functionality required.

A lot of educational establishments use cms to store all learning materials. e.g. Moodle.

This is easy for the school/college to maintain and allows access outside of the opening hours for students to obtain study materials.

Answer 5

There are so many CMS'es out there, because "a perfect CMS" is an unachievable goal, so it's a very attractive problem to solve. Much similar to thousands of "blogging platforms". CMS tries to present the solution to "suit them all", which will never work while we have literally few million ways to build a website. That's why there are so many of them: everyone has a different vision of what a website needs and a smaller segment of the market tries to present solutions for a very narrow set of the problem.

Most of the time I don't recommend people installing CMS for their websites, as people tend to abuse it and even the simplest CMS requires a good understanding of what is acceptable on the web. While things like Dreamweaver already offer more than enough for typical small company websites. So why waste all the effort if the end result is virtually the same.

However, if the website requires some sort of version control and collaborative editing, then a good CMS is a must. Basically, the need for a CMS is proportional to the complexity of the content editing required.

So, in my opinion, if you can get away without using it - go for it.

Intranet websites are a totally different story though.